Zukunft durch Beteiligung – landwirtschaftliche Tierhaltung im Dialog

This article presents a future workshop on agricultural livestock farming, which—as part of the SocialLab II project—developed and applied innovative methods including participating interest groups in the political transformation of livestock farming. This future workshop examines the desirable developments for agricultural livestock farming from the perspective of all interest groups. The interests in animal welfare, environmental and climate protection were taken into account, as well as the economic and practical requirements of the companies. Challenging for dialogs in the field of transforming animal husbandry are the sheer number of different demands from social groups. On the one hand, more and more interest groups are voicing new demands, for example in the area of climate protection. On the other hand, previously homogeneous interest groups, such as those from agriculture and from animal welfare, are becoming increasingly diversified in terms of goals, strategies and values. Animals are increasingly recognized as a group affected by politics with their own demands, although their political representation is still hardly regulated. This paper includes methodological features of the future workshop on agricultural livestock farming, the identified target images for agricultural livestock farming, effective approaches to stakeholder dialog and insights into the aspects of appreciation and communication in dialog between stakeholders. From a large number of positions and submissions, 3 future scenarios of livestock farming in Germany were identified: (i) higher standards, (ii) system change and reduction and (iii) alternatives to livestock farming. In future, policy measures and dialog formats in the field of livestock farming should disclose where they fit into this spectrum of objectives. Alliances and compromises between the visions of the future are possible in various combinations. Agreement on minimum legal requirements in animal welfare seems particularly urgent, as these form the starting point of the debate. In future, dialog formats should be more open about their contribution to the debate, whereby three functional areas of dialog formats can be distinguished.