Evaluation of BE-Rural’s stakeholder and public engagement activities

BE-Rural applied a variety of participatory tools with the aim to increase knowledge and build capacity among regional stakeholders and citizens, to collect their views on the bioeconomy and its potential for regional development and finally to co-create regional strategy and roadmap documents. The aim of this report is to reflect on the project’s participatory activities and share practical lessons learned with other regions across Europe regarding the development of regional bioeconomy strategies and roadmaps as part of a bottom-up participatory process. Participatory tools of various sizes and formats such as pop-up stores showcasing bio-based products, a teachers’ summer school, educational events, capacity-building and knowledge exchange seminars, regional stakeholder working groups and regional Task Forces for Business Development were organised at regional, national and European level. Based on these activities, the following key lessons learned can be identified:
• Public engagement: The mix of engagement tools targeted at the general public such as educational events for teachers and students, physical and virtual pop-up stores, social media and the project website was effective to reach different target groups. The use of local networks and age-appropriate educational material were key factors for the successful implementation. The developed bioeconomy games facilitated the interaction between participants, serving as both a teaching tool and icebreakers and educational entertainment (edutainment). Promoting the pop-upstores, side-events, etc. through local media (TV and radio) is key.
• Capacity building and knowledge exchange: Capacity building and knowledge exchange formats are important to facilitate mutual learning processes and lay the foundation for innovative development processes at regional level. One key factor for the success of these events was that they focused on region-specific bioeconomy opportunities, technologies, business models and policies.
• Participatory strategy and roadmap development: Involving stakeholders at the beginning of the strategy development process is important to create trust and allow all participants to co-develop outcomes. However, it was challenging to keep the stakeholders motivated and interested throughout the project duration and beyond. To prevent stakeholder fatigue, it is important to link the strategy or roadmap development process to existing debates and initiatives and emphasise the utilisation potential of the expected outputs and outcomes for the regional stakeholders.
• Business model development: The structured market assessment and business model design framework and the collaborative, iterative and incremental process were well received, considered useful to build capacity, and are applicable also in a rural context. Changing and adopting new business models remains difficult and is perceived as risky as no capital appears to be available for new business models in the context of rural regions. Further, this report includes a reflection on BE-Rural’s conceptual framework focusing on four key principles of co-creation, openness and inclusiveness, sustainability, and transparency. Here, particular attention has been paid to the challenges related to the implementation of bottom-up approaches in BE-Rural’s focal regions, the identification and consideration of gender aspects in strategy documents, the involvement of marginalised groups in the project activities as well as some sustainability limitations arising from the lack of robust biomass data at regional level.