Abstract
Viticulture negatively impacts the environment, biodiversity, and human health; however, despite the widely acknowledged challenges that this intensive agricultural activity poses to sustainable development, measures to reduce its invasiveness are constantly being deferred or rebuffed. Constraints to change are linked to vine cultivation methods, the impacts of climate change on vine resilience and disease sensitivity, and socio-economic models, as well as growing criticisms from society. Research and training have thus far failed to provide solutions or mobilise stakeholders on a large scale. Such resistance to sustainable practices development calls into question the effectiveness of knowledge production systems and relations between scientists, winegrowers, and society: Have scientific disciplines overly isolated themselves from each other and from the wider society to the point of losing the capacity to incorporate alternative forms of knowledge and reasoning and achieve collaborative action? Herein, we describe our findings from a participatory action research project that began in Westhalten, France, in 2013 and ultimately spread to Switzerland and Germany over the next 6 years. We show that participatory action research can mobilise long-term collaborations between winegrowers, NGOs, advisers, elected officials, members of civil society, and researchers, despite differing visions of viticulture and the environment. The epistemological framework of this research promotes consensus-building by valuing complexity and dissensus in knowledge and reasoning such that all actors are involved in experimentation and the production of results. From these findings, consensus statements were collectively elaborated in qualitative and quantitative registers. Once acknowledged by the scientific community, these consensus statements became shareable knowledge. We propose that this renewed interdisciplinarity associating the human and social sciences with agronomic and biological sciences in collaboration with stakeholders produces actionable knowledge that mobilises and engages winegrowers to conceive and implement sustainable viticulture on a transnational scale.
Highlights
With 7.5 million hectares of vines cultivated worldwide, viticulture is economically valued for its benefits to the production of wines and the picturesque landscapes it shapes for tourism and hedonism
Organic and biodynamic viticulture practices, which account for 10% and 1% of the land surfaces dedicated to viticulture, respectively, have a reputation for lower environmental impact because they do not use herbicides and use natural products to ensure the health of the vines (Organisation Internationale de la vigne et du vin (OIV), 2020)
In the face of such questions, with the objective of developing sustainable viticulture and, more broadly, sustainable agriculture, we propose the adoption of participatory approaches involving input from different communities, including growers and researchers from the natural, social, and human sciences to produce knowledge of different epistemological status
Summary
With 7.5 million hectares of vines cultivated worldwide, viticulture is economically valued for its benefits to the production of wines and the picturesque landscapes it shapes for tourism and hedonism. The REPERE method aims to demonstrate the potential to achieve agricultural sustainability through a bottom-up approach, whereby embracing varying forms or knowledge is critical to achieve the co-construction of innovation and collective commitment, and social, historical and cultural dimensions are founding elements in the development of the reasoning of the actors, the achievements, and the image This approach recognises constraints to change as well as the resources to produce the expected changes. Following an overview of the methods, the section encompasses three parts that describe the process of negotiating among varying knowledge paths to achieving consensus concerning directions toward change and elucidating constraints to change based on current conditions This is followed by a section comprised of three additional parts that, respectively, reflect upon the process of (i) conceiving new questions, addressing emerging constraints, (ii) developing inter-relationships between actors and across disciplines, and (iii) validating these collaborative efforts through the production of a peer-reviewed article in a scientific publication. The final section describes a model that illustrates how this participatory action project negotiated between and mobilised different types of knowledge and training along with their modes of construction and associated reasoning
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