Transdisciplinary participatory-action-research from questions to actionable knowledge for sustainable viticulture development

Viticulture negatively impacts the environment, biodiversity, and human health; however, despite the widely acknowledged challenges that this intensive agricultural activity poses to sustainable development, measures to reduce its invasiveness are constantly being deferred or rebuffed. Constraints to change are linked to vine cultivation methods, the impacts of climate change on vine resilience and disease sensitivity, and socio-economic models, as well as growing criticisms from society. Research and training have thus far failed to provide solutions or mobilise stakeholders on a large scale. Such resistance to sustainable practices development calls into question the effectiveness of knowledge production systems and relations between scientists, winegrowers, and society: Have scientific disciplines overly isolated themselves from each other and from the wider society to the point of losing the capacity to incorporate alternative forms of knowledge and reasoning and achieve collaborative action? Herein, we describe our findings from a participatory action research project that began in Westhalten, France, in 2013 and ultimately spread to Switzerland and Germany over the next 6 years. We show that participatory action research can mobilise long-term collaborations between winegrowers, NGOs, advisers, elected officials, members of civil society, and researchers, despite differing visions of viticulture and the environment. The epistemological framework of this research promotes consensus-building by valuing complexity and dissensus in knowledge and reasoning such that all actors are involved in experimentation and the production of results. From these findings, consensus statements were collectively elaborated in qualitative and quantitative registers. Once acknowledged by the scientific community, these consensus statements became shareable knowledge. We propose that this renewed interdisciplinarity associating the human and social sciences with agronomic and biological sciences in collaboration with stakeholders produces actionable knowledge that mobilises and engages winegrowers to conceive and implement sustainable viticulture on a transnational scale

Learning, reflexivity, decision-making, and behavioral change for sustainable viticulture associated with participatory action research

Abstract Despite the abundance of compelling scientific knowledge about dramatic changes in climate, biodiversity and the environment, there is little change in human behavior. Do humans perceive and understand the gravity of the challenges at stake, or are they overwhelmed by adversity? The challenge may be in finding appropriate levers to involve stakeholders in a broader process of shared learning, while producing scientific knowledge, to overcome uncertainty, and achieving the expected collective action? In the field of viticulture, researchers, winegrowers, citizens and environmental associations have been involved in participatory action research projects, one located in Switzerland, one in Germany and two in France. All actors were involved, from the formulation of questions up to the production of knowledge, to address the issue of the negative impacts of viticulture on the environment and human health. Group workshops and individual interviews were conducted on each of the four sites, for a nine-year period. A collective workshop involving also actors outside the project was conducted, and followed by a trinational workshop bringing together actors from Swiss, German and French projects. The audio recordings and writings produced were transcribed. All texts were analyzed on the linguistic level, with textometric tools, while going back to the actors’ initial quotes. Our results suggest that during the course of projects, more sustainable viticultural practices were designed, and implemented in the vineyard, on a large scale. Also, our analysis suggests that, in parallel to changes in viticulture practices, a new vocabulary, associated with different individual and collective reasoning, emerged in the discourse of the actors involved in projects. These major changes were associated with an inventiveness that developed within and beyond the groups. Because human reasoning changed in the context of participatory action research, we suggest that such a research format could address global issues, finally reaching awaited changes