13-15 Oct 2013 in Solsona, Spain

At the first Joint Meeting of FACESMAP in Sopron, Hungary, participants were experimenting with the idea of ‘travellab’. Travellab is a new name for the special kind of stakeholder interaction that we are developing in this COST Action. It refers to the joint learning processes arising from facilitated stakeholder interactions, during the Working Group meetings, and particularly during the field visits.

In Solsona, we drew on that experience and conducted a training school to develop our skills, competences and understanding of stakeholder interaction; i.e. to gain proficiency in knowing ‘who’ to involve in our research, ‘why’, ‘how’ and ‘when’.

The training school was organised as an interactive workshop and it entailed the following components:

• mutual learning from sharing of real life examples and practices
• knowledge about methods, techniques and formats for stakeholder interaction in natural resource management
• input from colleagues in neighbouring areas (sustainable land management) with thorough experience in and understanding of participatory research, stakeholder interaction and multi-stakeholder learning (Joris de Vente, Spain; Sandra Valente, Portugal)
• meta-level discussions on issues of participatory research and transdisciplinarity in FACESMAP context

Presentations from training school lecturers find here:

• “Training School Stakeholder Interaction in FACESMAP” - Kathrin Böhling, Filip Aggestam, Anna Lawrence, Gerhard Weiss
• “Communication and Facilitation during Stakeholder Interactions” - Filip Aggestam
• “Participatory decision making in environmental management. Lessons from sustainable land management in drylands” - Joris de Vente, Mark Reed, Lindsay Stringer, Sandra Valente, Jens Newig
• “Training School Stakeholder Interaction in FACESMAP – Background, Set-up & process, Output” - Kathrin Böhling