Remapping worldviews to build trust in multi-stakeholder collaborations

Most socio-technical challenges, like the transitions to energy-neutral and circular ways of producing and consuming, require the collaboration of multiple stakeholders. However, when businesses, governments, citizens and knowledge organisations work together, striving to include the ‘needs’ of natural ecological systems, they encounter many obstacles. In 2021, the Future-Proof Labs research group at The Hague University of Applied Sciences set out to determine, across diverse living labs, what aspects cause these obstacles and how to overcome them. One of the main findings of this research was that building understanding and trust between the different worldviews and values of the stakeholders is an important prerequisite for any transformation.

Designer Jan Ferrer i Picó, in his Master's graduation project, worked together with several stakeholders of a business-initiated lab (Greenport West-Holland, greenhouse horticulture businesses, citizens and researchers) to design a practical tool stakeholders can use both individually and in collaboration with each other, to create a ‘culture of care’ by aligning the values and narratives of the self and otherness (i.e. other fellow humans or living beings and systems), which are the cultural stories through which we understand the world and navigate it.

‍The groundwork for this care starts with acquiring awareness of the self: understanding one’s own narratives and behaviours, and opening up to the vulnerability of sharing them with others. These inner stories and outwards behaviours form their own kind of cartography (contexts and movements). On an individual level, this tool, with its stories, challenges each individual to embark on this journey of self-awareness and invites them to explore new understandings and provide a more accurate view of the power embodied in their identity, roles and culture. Meanwhile, in an interpersonal context, it opens up to understanding other cartographies, their powers, locations and the overlaps and divergences of different narratives. 

Jan sees the art of story-telling as a marvellous way to craft, express, and share such cartographies. Fictional works often present fascinating narratives that reveal and explain the workings of imaginary (or far too real) systems. But stories can also be meant to mirror existing ones and help us realise the narratives we embody through our reactions, reflections and behaviours when coming across the story. For this purpose, Jan developed a fictional reality containing five characters as a collection of distinctive cartographies, tightly related to those identified in the living labs involved in the research and inspired by the Integrative Worldviews Framework of researcher Annick de-Witt (WUR).

"The different components of the tool (stories and questions) serve as starting point to have conversations about the different ways we perceive and exist in the world"

The stories (one for each character) are part of an artefact that works as a boundary object. Each fable follows one of the main characters: a cat, a fox, a human, mice, and a pond. They, along with some guiding questions, help readers to look at their own cartographies as well as other people’s ones. Then, they can start to understand and (collectively) reimagine them through conversations, reflections, and action. Hence, the different components of the tool (stories and questions) serve as starting point to have conversations about the different ways we perceive and exist in the world, but also provide a pathway towards a common language for the different stakeholders — which does not necessarily mean to agree on values, interests, new narratives and actions.

The tool also focuses on enabling trust and mutual understanding to promote the inclusion of the ‘needs’ of natural ecological systems. That is because behind any (sustainability) project or activity there is a huge responsibility to make sure that the different worldviews involved contribute to a greater cultural diversity which supports a more attuned human existence on Earth. Such existence shall be understood as the stewardship of the sustainability of every form of life on Earth, not only of human lifestyle. Currently, nature’s needs and environmental perspectives are underrepresented if not completely avoided in collaborations. Many times, this happens due to the inner workings of some of the worldviews explored by the tool. For this purpose, the narratives and cartographies included in the fables represent different ways in which narratives related to nature are considered (from anthropocentric disregard of nature to planetary-centric takes).

During the first applications of this tool, stakeholders from the industry, the government and the knowledge institutions found that they could address differences in worldviews, values and expectations for and among themselves much faster and more directly than they had during previous instances. Moreover, reflections on how anthropocentric and solutionist practices are embodied also emerged. Therefore, it can be concluded that the use of the tool had an immediate impact on building trust and moving the collaboration forward, possibly into more planetary-attuned practices. The complete tool can be downloaded via de Innovation Networks website.

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