Putting transdisciplinarity into practice: a mixed mode procedure for stakeholder participation in natural resource management

Abstract

The definition of management actions in natural resource management requires the integration of all types of knowledge involved. An appropriate approach for such a challenge is the ideal of transdisciplinarity. A transdisciplinary process can be considered “consultative” when knowledge is simply gathered and collated, or “participatory” when knowledge integration is undertaken collectively. In this paper, we present a mixed mode procedure (i.e., using interviews, questionnaires, and group discussions) that empirically demonstrates the difference between consultative and participatory transdisciplinary processes. The mixed mode procedure is used for identifying the most relevant problems occurring in the coastal system of Praia da Vitória bay, Azores, Portugal. This mixed mode procedure is likely to be useful for other studies, because the results highlight the need to promote face-to-face interaction at the earliest opportunity, and because it allows an understanding to be gained of social learning processes, the influence of power, and participant behaviour during interaction with others.

Keywords:

• stakeholder participation
• sustainability
• natural resource management
• transdisciplinarity

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Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to all the participants of this project. This work was supported by the Foundation for Science and Technology and the Direcção Regional da Ciência e Tecnologia under grant [M3.1.3/F/015/2008]. The authors would like to thank Alison Neilson for her support in an earlier version of the work.

Notes

1. A sponsor may be defined as the exercise organiser. Within a transdisciplinary process, this may be any participant (i.e., scientific or non-scientific). In this paper, the sponsor is the research team.

2. Participants in transdisciplinary processes include individuals from the scientific community and practitioners (i.e., individuals who undertake different activities within the system that are not related to the production of science).

3. The analyst is the individual or group of individuals who undertake the data analysis.

4. Socio-ecological systems are linked systems of people and nature. The term emphasises that humans must be viewed as a part of, not apart from, nature, and that the delineation between social and ecological systems is artificial and arbitrary (Berkes and Folke 1998).

5. The approach utilises tools that help to understand “real” or “hard” systems (von Bertalanffy 1968), that is, systems that exist in physical terms, as well as “soft” systems (Checkland 1999), in which the perceived system is (no more than) a mental construct used for understanding and problem solving.

6. Q-methodology provides a foundation for the systematic study of subjectivity, a person's viewpoint, opinion, beliefs, or attitude (Stephenson 1935).

7. To apply the mixed mode procedure, participants should be available for an interview (lasting around two hours), the completion of the Q-sort questionnaire (around one hour), and finally engagement in a group discussion (around two-and-a-half hours).

8. The statements are translated from the original Portuguese.

9. Researchers need to be aware that the scale in a Q-sort is a relative one rather than an absolute one. Hence, interpreting statements in isolation might be misleading, and the placement of individual statements might make sense only in the context of the whole set.

10. Although factors 2 and 3 are defined by just one Q-sort each, we decided to present these results because the cumulative variance explained is 81% (see Table 5).