5 steps of our train-the-trainer workshops – example from our trip to Adana, Turkey
Adana is an 8000-year-old city in the south-eastern part of Turkey, and the fifth most populated city in the country with its 2.274 million inhabitants! Known more as an agricultural centre than that of fisheries, producing producing cotton, rice, sesame, oats, and citrus fruits. Adana is also a centre of the Turkish cotton industry and manufactures among others textiles, cement, agricultural machinery and vegetable oils.
It is also the city where the OptiFish partner Cukurova University, established in 1973, is located, and where partner SINTEF Ocean visited the first week of June 2024. Stakeholder workshops and co-production of knowledge are two key parts of OptiFish and EveryFish, both Horizon Europe projects, and the integration of this into OptiFish in a scientific manner is critical for effective implementation, upscaling possibilities and cross-comparability of results from the social science part of the projects.
SINTEF Ocean has a leading role in this work in both projects, and as part of OptiFish, a separate task had been set up for a “train-the-trainer” session with each partner that is scheduled to have a case study during the project period. The process, which will result in a training manual for use of the case area leaders, will be a publicly available manual that will be published after its submission and reviewed as a deliverable.
In short however, the train-the-trainer methodology consists of five steps:
- Stakeholder Power-Matrix – who are the actors involved; who are powerful AND interested and what levels of interest and power are we talking about?
- Stakeholder mapping – based on the matrix developed, how can we categorize these stakeholders into four groups? And who are the relevant stakeholders to invite from each of those groups?
- Invitations with GDPR signature pages
- Workshop 1:
- Conceptual Mapping using the freeware Vensim – 1 hour where facilitator steer the discussions on the lay of the land in terms of technology development, AI and camera systems for catch identification; and
- Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping – scenario building with stakeholders to come up with case-specific policy action plans.
- Workshop 2:
- Calibration and validation of the fuzzy cognitive map 2 years after first round of workshops, with representatives of same category stakeholders as identified in (2) and invited in (3).
The training started with presentation on the methodology and the drivers before delving into the concrete parts of the method. We spent a full day with this, with excellent participants from Cukurova University asking relevant questions on not just practical elements of the methodology, but also contextual questions about how this can best be adapted to the Turkish situation
This was the first training session of in total four that will take place before the end of July. The next three are planned for the first week of July, in the Netherlands, in Spain and in Denmark, corresponding to the OptiFish case areas.
Disclaimer
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or Research Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
