Utilizing Participative Action Research With Storytelling Interventions to Create Sustainability in Danish Farming

This article explains how participative action research (PAR) has been used to create a new intersubjective awareness of the phenomenon of sustainability among a group of farmers in Denmark. The question of creating voluntary democratic participation was crucial for all stakeholders in this project. Through a ‘storytelling futures’ workshop concept, the need for a new story about the industry was acknowledged and initiated to make choice of a non-status quo future. In this process, we deployed PAR to create new beliefs about being part of sustainable food production. The participants decided to co-author a counternarrative to the dominant political economy narrative about agriculture in Denmark. We contribute an understanding of the difference between PAR and AR this is less than participatory, develop a storytelling theory of the relation between narrative-counternarrative and developing new ‘antenarrative’ bets on the future.