A dialogue approach to enhance learning for sustainability. An Dutch experiment with two participatory methods in the field of climate change

Abstract

This article addresses the involvement of stakeholders in sustainability research and suggests that stakeholder dialogues should be perceived as processes of learning and argumentation. Rather than urging the participants in a dialogue to seek a consensus on a specific solution strategy, the dialogue design should prevent certain issues and viewpoints from being (ex ante) excluded from the analysis by facilitating the explo-ration of different (conflicting) claims and arguments about the problem and about its possible solutions (‘learning by argument’). The article reports on a Dutch stake-holder dialogue initiative in the field of climate change, and shares insights about the use of two particular methods that were used in this dialogue – interactive backcast-ing and repertory grid analysis – and the extent to which these methods encouraged the argumentative process. The use of two evaluative criteria, ‘differentiation’ and ‘integration’, made clear that interactive backcasting facilitated the argumentative process by providing a better understanding of the implementation pathways of a broad range of response options to climate change, while repertory grid analysis con-tributed to the integration of the backcasting results and the development of criteria for climate policy. Although both methods need to be improved for future applica-tions, they seem to be promising methods to be used in future interactive sustainabil-ity research.