Sustainable Agriculture in Aotearoa: Social Learning through Piecewise Deliberation

This paper presents and illustrates design principles in a programme of applied science and stakeholder consultation on sustainable agriculture in New Zealand. We report procedures and tools for building deliberations around agriculture performance, societal responsibilities and regional planning challenges, focussing on the question of how effectively to mobilise knowledge from different sources and at different scales about environmental and economic systems to address sustainability policy challenges. A five step framework for stakeholder-based integrated appraisal of collective resource management challenges, called "INTEGRAAL", is used as a basis for identifying different types of deliberation tasks carried out through dialogues facilitated by social science researchers and consultants, engaging scientists, decision-makers and other stakeholders. These tasks can be considered as components in comprehensive integrated assessment procedures. We highlight, with examples from workshops engaging representatives of New Zealand farming and regional government stakeholder communities, how the individual deliberation tasks can be effective as "piecewise" contributions to social learning and capacity building for addressing the dilemmas and complex information needs of contemporary sustainability challenges. In this way, integrative perspectives can be applied progressively, at modest cost and in a decentralised way, adapted to local circumstances and changing needs.