Co-designing an eco-citizen dairy cattle farming system experiment: insights from practice

Abstract

The livestock farming sector is under pressure to transition towards sustainable systems that meet the expectations of both farmers and society. Such transitions require design approaches that combine inputs from science and stakeholders. Step-by-step design approaches to conceive and pilot farming system experiments are considered promising to produce knowledge that is useful for the transition to new systems. However, involving stakeholders in the design process of experiments raises a number of questions about the conditions required for fruitful collaboration. Collaborative processes and the contributions of participants to them often remain vague. Therefore, the objective of this study was to analyze a co-design process of a dairy cattle farming system experiment conducted on a research station in France. Its novelty lies in its focus on participants’ activities and contributions throughout this process rather than on the outcome of the experiment. Seventeen interactions between dairy cattle farmers, local actors in the dairy sector, and scientists of the public sector contributing to the design process were analyzed. The results showed that interaction formats strongly affected participation rates, but also the frequency of co-design activities. Moreover, the participants contributed through collaborative design activities which touched not only the farming system, but also the experimental methods used and the way of collectively working together. In addition, they often carried out more collaborative design activities than were asked of them and redirected conception levels as targeted by the farm experiment leaders on different occasions. Lastly, weak explicit connections between co-design interactions and practices implemented in the experiment were observed. These results allow us to question how to steer collective design processes, identify challenges, and share lessons learnt for future co-design initiatives.