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

We explain how Participatory Action Research (PAR)
and storytelling methods have been used to create
a new intersubjective awareness of sustainability
potential among a group of farmers in Denmark.
We asked the following intervention question: How
can PAR be combined with storytelling to create
new intersubjective perceptions about farmers'
sustainability in their daily work life? 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 utilized 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. First,
we contribute an understanding of the difference
between PAR and AR. PAR develops collective
storytelling approach, whereas AR stays with the
intervenor’s narrative. Our second contribution is
to overcome several short-comings of the triplebottom line approach. In particular, we developed
metrics and objectives to flex out the people and
planet aspects, rather than the usual reductions of
these to profit metrics.