WP6 – Role of Stakeholders

Work package 6 will draw heavily from the work of Bell and Morse (1999, 2003) in the Mediterranean. Their methodology – orginally called Systemic Sustainability Analysis and now refereed to as ‘Imagine’ – is derived from ‘soft systems’ approaches within institutional contexts and has proved to be very successful in allowing practitioners to arrive at a shared deconstruction of issues and identification of constraints and ways forward. In this work package the method will be employed to explore how potential ‘users’ of indicators engage with the tools and what constraints may prevent successful indicator use. This work package is likely to provide a more nuanced understanding of the term ‘use’, to encompass the various ways in which indicators are ‘consumed’ and thus influence policy through a variety of pathways.

Seven in-country workshops will be organised in collaboration with WPs 3, 4 and 5. A stakeholder-led analysis will be conducted in each workshop, resulting in a report based upon a meta-analysis of the findings from the workshops. One objective of the workshops is to foster peer group learning whereby the participating indicator practitioners will learn from each other just as much as researchers learn from the practitioners.

The first four workshops, focusing on sustainable development indicators, were held in Malta and Slovakia in March and April 2009, and in Finland in September 2009. The fifth workshop was held in Copenhagen on 25 and 26 November 2009. For a description of the findings from the first three workshops, see the POINT Policy Briefing 1. For interim reports from the workshops, see the publications.