DiverBeans - Report of the first stakeholder workshop held in North Macedonia

Summary in the original language of the document

Common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) is a crop that is traditionally grown and widely consumed in North Macedonia. Despite its cultural and economic relevance, total bean production has reduced by about 30% in the last ten years (1). Many environmental, social and economic factors hamper bean production in the country. The DiverBeans project aims to improve organic bean production in North Macedonia. This is a two-year project funded by Coop (through ETH Foundation), a retail and wholesale market company in Switzerland.
Coop has been buying organically produced beans from one of the project partners, Suzana Dimitrievska, in North Macedonia since 2016. They are now interested in increasing the quantity of beans that they can import for the Swiss market. Effective implementation of the project requires involvement of multiple stakeholders and therefore, the project adapted a transdisciplinary approach from the outset.
The transdisciplinary research process tries to link two types of knowledge in order to develop solutions. One is the scientific knowledge, where scientists conduct research on e.g., the societal issues. The second is the knowledge outside academia, where actors e.g., try to understand and tackle a particular farming related problem (2,3). In a transdisciplinary research process, this knowledge will be brought together and integrated in a process of dialogue in order to jointly create and validate new knowledge and to learn from each other.
Transdisciplinarity is an important project approach that involves real world problems and it accepts that scientists, practitioners and affected communities have a different viewpoint of the existing issues and different expectations. The aim is to find better solutions that are acceptable by stakeholders and have therefore a higher potential to be implemented.
Therefore, as a first step in our project, we organized and delivered a stakeholder workshop in North Macedonia on the 3rd and the 4th of September, 2019.