(Facilitating) learning in workshops to develop scenarios for short food supply chain initiatives

This data set contains five excerpts of transcripts of observed workshops aimed at creating scenarios for Short Food Supply Chain (SFSC) initiatives in Ghent, a Belgian city with approximately 250.000 residents. Ghent has launched a local food policy that aims to contribute to a transition towards a sustainable agri-food system. One of its strategic goals is to stimulate the SFSC and to create close relationships between local food producers and consumers. While there were already many established initiatives for stimulating SFSC at the level of business-to-consumer (B2C – farmers to individual customers), initiatives at business-to-business level (B2B – farmers to the catering industry, large kitchens and retail) were still scarce in Ghent. Yet, precisely these are assumed to have great potential of substantially increasing the volumes of food traded in this way. Therefore, the municipality launched a project to develop scenarios for new pilot experiments for B2B SFSC together with diverse local stakeholders: Farmers, representatives of the catering industry, retailers, chefs of restaurants, cooks in large kitchens, experts, civil servants, etc. Three scenarios were developed – one for a SFSC distribution platform, one for a knowledge platform, and one for a farmers’ network – through seven workshops. The excerpts in this dataset come from the two workshops where the participants developed a scenario for a SFSC distribution platform. 

These initiatives have been investigated as a case study in another project which focused on how urban sustainability transition initiatives can function as educative spaces to explore and create new possibilities for a more sustainable future. The selected excerpts have been analysed to gain insight into the learning taking place during the workshops, in particular the potential of learning processes and outcomes to enable transitions, and the influence of facilitators’ actions on participants’ learning. The excerpts are verbatim transcriptions of conversations between participants. They are a selection of a larger data set that have been pseudonymized and translated from Dutch to English for analyses described in articles.