Published on 11 March 2024
Blog post by: David Bavin, RENEW ExCASES Postdoctoral Researcher
In November 2023, ExCASES were excited to facilitate a session at the annual RENEW Biodiversity Parliament, hosted at the National Trust HQ in Swindon.
We wanted to give a flavour of what an ExCASES participatory workshop looks like and demonstrate practically how we develop mission proposals to ensure they are interdisciplinary, agile and codesigned. It was also a rare opportunity to collect mission ideas and inputs from the many, diverse experts in the room.
Above: RENEW Postdoctoral Researcher – David Bavin presents findings from ExCASES first mission.
As such, we designed and facilitated an interactive group work activity. Encouraging everyone to mix up and sit with people they didn’t know, we gave each table of delegates a short, prewritten mission brief, taken from our mission bank. The topics varied greatly, showing how wide-ranging our missions on biodiversity renewal can be. They included upland grazing, sustainable seafood, survival ecology and intergenerational justice. With a list of prompt questions, each table utilised their multi-disciplinary, cross-sectoral perspectives to rapidly scope and develop their mission under three headings: research questions and directions, methodology, and key partners/collaborators.
There was quite a buzz in the room as groups got to work. The ExCASES team circulated, offering support, and found everyone deep in animated, excitable conversations. It was interesting to see how people reacted in different ways to the subjects they were tackling – for some, there was already a familiarity with the topics, whilst others were coming with little pre-existing knowledge. Furthermore, people from different disciplines (for example, poets and economists, ecologists and geographers) took on the task in a variety of ways, seeing the mission brief through their own lens and bringing that to the table. For this kind of activity, all perspectives are really valuable, as together they open up the potential to find a unique angle or approach which hasn’t been done before.
Above: Members of the RENEW team engaged in interactive group work activities.
In just twenty minutes of concentrated discussion and planning, the Biodiversity Parliament delegates generated lots of new ideas for six different missions, and given there were around 80 participants, this equates to approximately 26 hours of work in total! We are very grateful for all the contributions that were made. This was not purely an exercise to get people thinking and talking – these are real ‘live’ missions that the ExCASES team is at various stages of scoping, so the ideas put forward from all the groups have been collated and may be used as we go forward.
The rapid mission ideation was a fantastic, time-efficient and hugely useful exercise, so much so that we are now working out ways of holding similar conversations with the wider RENEW team and partners more regularly. This will open pathways for more intentional and cross-cutting collaborations between themes at RENEW, as well as better utilise the networks, relationships, expertise and methodological approaches we have in our impressive team.
In the meantime, we have created this online collaboration space using Padlet where you can add your own ideas, contacts, suggestions, insights and thoughts to any of our missions. We’d love to see your contributions.
Finally, here are links to the write-up of the Biodiversity Parliament Groupwork; our regularly updated ExCASES Missions Bank and ExCASES Heat Map.
