Methodology on awareness raising and capacity building: A guideline for participatory processes on salinization and saline agriculture

Saline farming is not just a bio-technical challenge. The agricultural innovation requires adjustments to the governance of water, farmland, and food production. To this day, however, there is -to some extent- a taboo on saline farming. Often salinization is not seen as a genuinely urgent challenge or saline farming is dismissed as an undesirable pathway. Hence, a lot of work remains to be done, at the international level as well as the local level.

Work package six of the SALFAR project focusses on the awareness raising and the capacity building. Across the North Sea region, the various SALFAR partners engage with the local stakeholders including farmers, food producers, crop developers, retailers, urban and landscape designers, scientists, water and agricultural policy workers. Through participatory research at the regional level, SALFAR acquires insights on the local awareness about salinization and the local capacity for saline farming. Next, the results of these various local participation processes feed into a cross-case comparison. This analysis on those will generate insights on generic as well as location-specific barriers to saline farming in the North Sea region.

This document aims to co-ordinate these local participation processes. At the end of SALFAR this document will be evaluated and transposed to a practical methodology on saline farming. Based on the experience with the practical guideline (section 4) and its’ composing parts such as focus groups, farm visits, farmer cafés, the guideline will be refined. As such, work package 6 delivers a practical methodology on awareness raising and capacity building for saline farming (=SALFAR deliverable 6.1), applicable in other parts of the North Sea region and other (European) regions.