Elsevier

Futures

Volume 76, February 2016, Pages 42-54
Futures

Puzzling stakeholder views for long-term planning in the bio-economy: A back-casting application

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2015.04.002Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The paper explores the use of an adapted participatory back-casting in dealing with long term issues.

  • Stakeholder participation may improve the quality of complex decisions.

  • Speeding up the participatory process increased the number of participants.

  • The proposed methodology enabled the powering and the puzzling processes.

Abstract

Planning long-term actions in the South of Italy is often characterised by a ‘vicious circle of non-participation’. Stakeholders are increasingly not aware of the relevant role they have in supporting policy-making processes, even if they are usually keen to express their opinions. The aim of the study is to suggest policy-makers and practitioners a way to change their approach to long-term strategies definition in areas with traditionally scarce experience in stakeholder participation and where ‘good governance’ often lacks. On the whole, empirical results are very positive. The study allowed us to combine both puzzling and powering required by long-term strategies with a positive effect on the democratisation of the policymaking. In particular, both the e-mail survey and the workshop were important moments to sharing knowledge with experts, to putting together the different visions from stakeholders and to drawing possible policy actions (puzzling). Moreover, the backcasting timeline that clearly indicates the sequence of events and the involved stakeholders, and the strategy's validation questionnaires can be intended as a step towards a guide as to how power can be organised for each stage of the process (powering).

Introduction

Many rural areas in Europe struggle with depopulation and a declining economy. They therefore seek new development opportunities. Bio-based industries can form such a new development opportunity (Krajnc & Domac, 2007). From the policy-making point of view, this is a typical long-term policy issue presenting tricky governance challenges. In particular, the development of a bio-based industry is a long-term, complex socio-technical (political) process involving many stakeholders on multiple levels and sectors (Munda, 2004) that could have large impacts on the region. As all long-term issues, bio-based industry development is affected by uncertainty. Therefore, the identification of the most appropriate strategy should be based on the involvement of all stakeholders (Patel, Kok, & Rothman, 2007), preferably through a ‘participatory method’1 that takes long term processes into account (Antunes et al., 2006, Lopolito et al., 2011). These ‘social experiments’ involve bringing stakeholders together so they can talk about some specific issues, become informed about them, and arrive at a strategy for taking action (Webler & Tuler, 2002). Participatory backcasting can help in decision-making processes that deal with long-term goals (van de Kerkhof, 2006, Carlsson-Kanyama et al., 2008, Kok et al., 2011, Robinson et al., 2011), such as the development of a bio-based industry.

Since uncertainty that accompanies long-term policy definition creates highly complex governance challenges, in the strategy definition process, powering and puzzling have been considered the two most relevant driving forces affecting the final outcome (Vink, Boezeman, Dewulf, & Termeer, 2013).

Ideally, participatory processes should empower participants to have an impact on policy, but this might be quite difficult in regions where a participatory tradition is lacking (Varela-Ortega, 2011). Participatory approaches to supporting policy-making are widely adopted in Northern American and Northern European countries, while in Southern Europe there is often considerably less experience. A possible explanation is that in Southern Europe, for cultural reasons, decision-making processes are generally under the control of politicians (democratically elected) and famous and powerful experts (i.e. technocrats nominated by political groups and strong lobbies). The result is the enabling of strong lobbies and relevant opinion makers that affect the decision-making process and defend some particular interests while neglecting others. In the South of Italy, for example, political representatives or experts nominated by political groups are often acting on behalf of stakeholders in long-term decision-making. On the contrary, a more direct participation would lead to a more general and indirect strategy to pursuing common interests.

What happens in the South of Italy can be called a ‘vicious circle of non-participation’. Stakeholders are increasingly not aware of the relevant role they have in supporting policy-making processes and are less and less able to provide any sort of contribution to policy and economic strategies, with the risk of the failure of the policy itself in the long term (Odugbemi & Jacobsoon, 2008).

Our work is based on the hypothesis that in Italy stakeholders are usually keen to express their opinions and to discuss openly. For example, in the study of Carlsson-Kanyama et al. (2008), it emerges as in Italy, during the workshops, the number of ideas per participant is high compared to participatory workshops in other countries. Therefore, they need a structured technique that is able to foster their participation, stimulate the interaction, and provide a coherent and effective synthesis of the process, leading to a validated strategy which could represent a consistent support for public decision-makers and policy-makers. Participatory backcasting has been proposed as such a tool (van Berkel and Verburg, 2012, Carlsson-Kanyama et al., 2008, Svenfelt et al., 2011).

The aim of the study is to suggest policy-makers and practitioners a way to change their approach to long-term strategies definition in a region with traditionally scarce experience in stakeholder participation. In the study we propose an adapted participatory backcasting methodology to improve stakeholders participation in dealing with uncertainty and ambiguity of a long-term issue such as bio-economy in the South of Italy. The main challenge relies on the fact that either stakeholders or policy makers are very sensitive and active in the quest of short-term policy solutions. Meanwhile, the interest in long-term problem specification related to new issues (such as bio-economy) is very poor.

To date, the literature related to experience with this topic is still scarce, so we hope it could contribute to strengthen the awareness of the usefulness of stakeholders’ participation in long-term planning processes in the Mediterranean countries. This should be able to guarantee both puzzling and powering processes required by long-term strategies.

The novelty of the proposed study lies on an approach to stimulate stakeholders participation and to depict a draft on how to organise stakeholders coalitions on future issues such as the development of bio-economy in rural areas. Bio-economy is a rather new and poorly defined topic, affected by many uncertainties that make it a quite tricky and unattractive topic for policy makers. Therefore, in such a situation, the real challenge is not only to increase the participation rate2 but also on stakeholders’ participation and engagement on the definition of a long term strategy.

This is especially relevant in Italy, where stakeholders are often reluctant to attend participatory workshops and if they do, not for the whole length and time of which traditional participatory backcasting approaches need.

The paper will mostly concentrate on the first two pillars, regarding the mechanisms suitable to favourite the different groups of citizens (i.e. stakeholders), leading to the formulation of a common vision.

The structure of the proposed participatory approach aimed to increase participation and engagement by parties that otherwise might be badly represented or have no role in long term strategy definition. By combining a voting mechanism (selecting alternatives) and a participatory workshop (provided that good facilitation should guarantee a balanced playing field), we aim to structure the puzzling, giving the more silent actors an equal vote to the more dominant actors. The modified back-casting guarantees that the same stakeholders participate to puzzling. In addition, a preliminary contribution to powering is represented either by putting actions on the timeline (it gives an idea on when and with which stakeholders to organise power coalitions) or by broadening the consensus through the involvement in the strategy validation of absent stakeholders. Finally, we evaluate the stakeholders’ satisfaction by analysing stakeholders’ feedback about the workshop.

What we learned from this case study represents a valuable outcome that can help practitioners, policy makers and researchers of areas affected by low stakeholders’ participation rates on how to involve them in the definition of long-term and future strategies.

Section snippets

Aggregating preferences and decision-making about long-term issues

This research is based on the assumption that there is a strong need for policy solutions to match the way stakeholders perceive the problem for which the solution was introduced in the first place. If there is no match, then stakeholders might start to perceive their government as undemocratic and unresponsive.

To remedy to this, we adopted the approach proposed by Hoppe (2010), claiming that more attention should be paid by both government and stakeholders to the way in which problems are

Definition and aims of normative scenarios studies

Recently the concept of bio-economy has been gaining more and more relevance. It is part of the strategy Europe 2020 aiming at “…smart, sustainable and inclusive growth” (European Commission, 2010). The term stands for a broad range of activities “…as it encompasses the production of renewable biological resources and the conversion of these resources and waste streams into value added products, such as food, feed, bio-based products and bioenergy” (European Commission, 2012:3). A key element

Overview

This paper introduces an adapted participatory back-casting approach for puzzling process in Apulia region, in the South of Italy, an area with little tradition on this domain3.

The traditional structure of a backcasting experiment (with two workshops) does not guarantee the attendance of the same participants4

Endpoint

The first questionnaire showed that the respondents mostly preferred the second endpoint: Creation and development of a market for products (bio-plastics, biomaterials, bio-fuels) made from agro-food industry waste. The preference of those who attended the workshop was rather similar to the overall results. Although not all participants of the workshop had chosen this endpoint in the questionnaire (Table 2), there was little discussion on using it in the workshop.

Obstacles

Both groups at the workshop

Discussion and conclusions

Looking at the third questionnaire's results (Table 8) could be a good starting point to express some comment about the study. With regard to the ‘involvement’ section, the respondents have confirmed the strategy outlined on the basis of the workshop's results and are “willing to participate in follow-up workshop”. This statement is confirmed by the replies about the ‘strategy’. The low level of influence perceived by the respondents about the results of the workshops together with the moderate

Acknowledgements

This study was funded by the EU 7th FP “Strategic & Technological Advancement in Research on Agroenergy” (STAR Agroenergy) research project.

References (55)

  • A. Lopolito et al.

    Modeling the bio-refinery industry in rural areas: A participatory approach for policy options comparison

    Ecological Economics

    (2011)
  • K. McCormick et al.

    Key barriers for bioenergy in Europe: Economic conditions, know-how and institutional capacity, and supply chain co-ordination

    Biomass and Bioenergy

    (2007)
  • G. Munda

    Social multi-criteria evaluation: Methodological foundations and operational consequences

    European Journal of Operational Research

    (2004)
  • M. Patel et al.

    Participatory scenario construction in land use analysis: An insight into the experiences created by stakeholder involvement in the Northern Mediterranean

    Land Use Policy

    (2007)
  • J.B. Robinson

    Unlearning and backcasting: Rethinking some of the questions we ask about the future

    Technological Forecasting and Social Change

    (1988)
  • J. Quist et al.

    Past and future of backcasting: The shift to stakeholder participation and a proposal for a methodological framework

    Futures

    (2006)
  • M.S. Reed

    Stakeholder participation for environmental management: A literature review

    Biological Conservation

    (2008)
  • M.S. Reed et al.

    Journal of Environmental Management

    (2009)
  • J. Robinson

    Energy backcasting—A proposed method of policy analysis

    Energy Policy

    (1982)
  • J. Robinson et al.

    Envisioning sustainability: Recent progress in the use of participatory backcasting approaches for sustainability research

    Technological Forecasting and Social

    (2011)
  • J. Robinson

    Future subjunctive: Backcasting as social Learning

    Futures

    (2003)
  • A. Roos et al.

    Critical factors to bioenergy implementation

    Biomass and Bioenergy

    (1999)
  • C. Rosch et al.

    Energy from biomass: Do non-technical barriers prevent an increased use?

    Biomass and Bioenergy

    (1999)
  • A. Svenfelt et al.

    Decreasing energy use in buildings by 50% by 2050. A backcasting study using stakeholder groups

    Technological Forecasting and Social Change

    (2011)
  • M.J. Vink et al.

    Changing climate, changing frames, Dutch water policy frame developments in the context of a rise and fall of attention to climate change

    Environmental Science & Policy

    (2013)
  • I.E. Andersen et al.

    Scenario workshops and consensus conferences: Towards more democratic decision-making

    Science and Public Policy

    (1999)
  • K. Arrow

    Social choice and individual values

    (1951)
  • Cited by (35)

    • Strategic planning of rural areas: Integrating participatory backcasting and multiple criteria decision analysis tools

      2022, Socio-Economic Planning Sciences
      Citation Excerpt :

      It would therefore be necessary to adopt a methodology that first identifies the preferences and needs of rural stakeholders through a participatory approach and that subsequently allows their hierarchisation. Among the different approaches that may be used to conduct effective stakeholder participation in defining long-term strategies [3,19,20], we concentrate in particular on backcasting [23]. Backcasting [23–26] is a participatory method that, more than other participatory tools, involves participants in the entire strategic planning process.

    • Stakeholder participation in local governance as a key to local strategic development

      2021, Cities
      Citation Excerpt :

      From this we conclude that the level of real involvement is questionable and probably lower, and we cannot speak of applying a local self-government approach to the real conditions of local self-governments in the Slovak Republic. The research also confirms the findings of Sisto et al. (2016) that the stakeholders are not aware of the relevant role they have in supporting policy-making processes. The participation rate at each planning stage is sufficient only for those entities that are legally bound to participate (e.g., mayors, councillors, citizens), as confirmed by research conducted by Quesada-Silva et al. (2019).

    • A transition to an innovative and inclusive bioeconomy in Aragon, Spain

      2019, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions
      Citation Excerpt :

      Some of the studies that have focused on how to expand implementation of a bioeconomic model as a basis of regional development (Radulescu et al., 2018; Devaney and Henchion, 2017), point out the need to involve citizens in key decisions, facilitating citizen participation processes or, to put it another way, responsive bioeconomy (Mustalahti, 2018). Consequently, inclusive development (George et al., 2012; Sisto et al., 2016) and inclusive growth (George et al., 2012; Grundel and Dahlstrom, 2016) only fit into an inclusive governance scenario. This framework is also only feasible if people commit effectively to the bioeconomic model (Sleenhoff and Osseweijer, 2016).

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text