Ethnographer as honest broker: the role of ethnography in promoting deliberation in local climate policies

Introduction

There has been a growing interest among critical policy scholars to look at deliberation and expertise as a social practice. This discussion is particularly relevant in relation to local climate change response policies. The currently prevalent expert-driven top-down approaches are important in regulating businesses tackling the transnational aspects of climate change (see Hermansen and Sundqvist Citation2022; Saravade et al. Citation2022), however, they are insufficient to result in meaningful local adoption and implementation of the urgent socio-economic measures needed to confine environmental degradation. In accordance with current approaches to climate change response policies, we believe that community-centered deliberative approaches can contribute to reducing community vulnerability to the impacts of a changing climate and to increase the resilience of both social and natural systems (see Forsyth Citation2017).

We follow a systemic approach to deliberative democracy (Parkinson and Mansbridge Citation2012), which prompts us to think about deliberative democracy as a system, to analyze the division of labor among its constituent parts, the impact of contextual issues and systemic inadequacies on individual sites, and the possibilities of effective deliberation. In this vein, we look at local policies as deliberative systems that need to fulfil three functions: (1) the epistemic function of ensuring ‘reasonably sound decisions’; (2) the ethical function of promoting ‘mutual respect among citizens’ and (3) the democratic function of promoting ‘an inclusive process of collective choice’. ‘The successful realization of all three of these functions promotes the legitimacy of democratic decision-making by ensuring reasonably sound decisions in the context of mutual respect among citizens and an inclusive process of collective choice.’ (ibid., 12).

The paper summarizes the results of the multidisciplinary applied research project Stories of Drought, which combines natural and social sciences, and aims to understand how people in Czech rural areas respond to the effects of climate change, especially drought. The research focused on the conflicting activities and agendas of different stakeholders and traced their impact on the landscape and its resilience in times of climate crisis. Between 2019 and 2021, researchers were conducting ethnographic research, archival research, mapping land use changes, monitoring climate change effects, and debating with stakeholders about how drought currently affected their lives, formed their future expectations, and influenced their everyday practices vis-à-vis the changing landscape.

In contrast to several other studies (Carrel Citation2015; Eastwood Citation2005), we do not use ethnography only to study deliberative processes; rather, we intend to interpret ethnographic research as a social practice that might have deliberative consequences.

The paper introduces ethnographic research as a tool to strengthen these three functions of the deliberative system. In the empirical part, the paper will introduce the findings that address the following questions: (1) how ethnographic research has influenced local knowledge in studied localities, (2) how ethnographic research has promoted discussion and mutual respect among stakeholders, and (3) how ethnographic research has promoted an inclusive process of collective choice. In other words, we explore the extent to which ethnographic research can serve as a stimulating ‘focal point’ (Parkinson Citation2006, 177) for enabling societal deliberation. In the last part of the article, we establish the ethnographer as an honest and trustworthy broker between different kinds of expertise and actors with different stakes.

In what follows, we start by introducing our theoretical background. Secondly, we briefly describe the project ‘The Stories of Drought’. Thirdly, we illustrate how the ethnographer can mediate different types of knowledge, promote respect among diverse actors and sensitively deal with power structures. This leads us to a final reflection in which we suggest three crucial conditions that are necessary for strengthening the ethnographer’s role in promoting public deliberation: maintaining its hybrid status in multidisciplinary teams, enhancing its trustworthiness, and building institutionally recognized expertise. These conditions allow for a response to the key power imbalances that block further strengthening of local deliberative systems.

Theoretical background

The research project “The Stories of Drought”

The study is based on the research project ‘The Stories of Drought’, conducted between 2019 and 2022 in six municipalities in South Moravia, the driest and warmest region of the Czech Republic (Figure 1). The goal of the project was to analyze how different segments of society respond to changes in the natural environment resulting from drought and to create tools to increase the involvement of citizens, landscape managers, and public administration in the implementation of drought protection measures. The selected localities reflect various climate and natural conditions as well as various states of landscape planning. The chosen municipalities are rather small, having between 350 and 2000 inhabitants. All of them have suitable conditions for agriculture, with a widespread tradition of wine growing and wine production. The localities can be conceptualized as two regions: the Nové Mlýny region (Dolní Dunajovice, Šakvice), served by large reservoirs built in the 1980s, and the Kyjovsko region (Šardice, Syrovín, Těmice, Domanín).

The project involved three research organizations and combined both basic and applied research as well as four disciplines: geography, ecology, climatology, and social anthropology. The geographers and ecologists produced maps of past and current land cover and spatially explicit data. The climatologists analyzed climate data and made future climate projections for the region study. The anthropologists created and analyzed ethnographic data regarding landscape management and land use in the past, present, and expected future. The ethnographic inquiry was conducted between 2019 and 2021 by a team of 4 anthropologists, two in each region (Nové Mlýny and Kyjovsko). During these years, they repeatedly visited the field for periods of 5–10 days, devoted to in-depth interviews, informal interviews, observation and archival research. The created data were analyzed and complemented by the document analysis of legislation, strategic plans, and other development documents at the local, regional, and national levels; and media analysis.

We used purposeful sampling techniques for the selection of the participants as well as for the policy documents and archival materials. For the selection of the interlocutors, we combined critical case sampling and snowball sampling (Patton Citation2015). We conducted 72 in-depth interviews and dozens of informal interviews during the field research, focusing on the current state of the landscape, water and landscape management, land use policy, and prospects and expectations for a future shaped by climate change effects. Research participants included mayors and representatives of local authorities; forest managers; local farmers and wine growers; NGO representatives; representatives of voluntary associations of municipalities and local action groups; civil servants; water managers; ecologists and environmental activists; scientists; local inhabitants with no special agenda. In accordance with current debates on qualitative research ethics, our approach was strongly reflexive, and our activities in the field were rooted in a sensitivity to justice and equity. The team sought to purposefully give voice to all actors, regardless of their position in power structures and hierarchies.

To ensure transparency and informed consent, all the participants were provided clear information about the project, its purpose, the right to decline to participate and to withdraw from the research at any time. They were informed about the intended form of the research results publication (web page, scientific articles, educational materials). The consent process ensured that all participants were participating voluntarily, with full knowledge of all the aspects of the research. They were offered anonymization, which the majority took advantage of, but a few actors preferred to be quoted under their own name.

Based on these research materials, the researchers collaboratively developed landscape change scenarios for 2050 based on site-specific climate models, scenarios for the development of landscape elements, and expert projections of social and political drivers and processes, which were all displayed in the form of maps. We chose an interdisciplinary mixed-methods approach to the development of future landscape scenarios, combining qualitative and quantitative methods and research-driven (exploratory) and participatory (normative) processes of scenario development. The scenarios served as a background for participatory workshops in the localities, aimed at facilitating discussions among various stakeholders with different and sometimes contradictory agendas. We presented the maps of future scenarios to the stakeholders; then we discussed these maps with them and contrasted the maps with the stakeholders’ expectations and visions of desired future landscape development. The results of these discussions were subject to subsequent interpretation and map modifications. This way we were able to create (normative) participatory backcasting scenarios that served to broaden exploratory scenarios using the stakeholders’ perspectives of landscape dynamics.

Mapping of key public disputes: using ethnography as a perspective and toolbox

In the following part, we focus on the role of ethnography in public dialogue in Dolní Dunajovice and Šakvice, two municipalities in the vicinity of the Nové Mlýny reservoirs. We map the key disputes we identified in our fieldwork and relate them to the main deliberative functions: (1) epistemic (reasonably sound decisions), (2) ethical (mutual respect among stakeholders), and (3) democratic (an inclusive process of collective choice). To achieve this, we use ethnography as both a perspective and toolbox as is common practice in qualitative studies of deliberative democracy.

The area under study is in South Moravia, the driest and warmest region of the Czech Republic. Despite the fact that until a few years ago it was quite common in the Czech Republic to deny anthropogenic global warming (see Vidomus Citation2018), we encountered a consensus among actors that the effects of climate change had already manifested in their everyday environment. This can probably be attributed not only to the influence of education and the media but also to the personal experience of local inhabitants, who referred to extreme drought, changes in the intensity and distribution of rainfall, more frequent or severe heat waves, etc. However, there are disputes concerning the extent and form of these effects, as well as disagreements over responsibility for their causes and solutions, resulting from asymmetries in information and the personal interests of key stakeholders.

In this region, a large-scale project of renewing and rebuilding the irrigation system with the supply source in the Nové Mlýny reservoirs is underway, which would require raising the reservoirs’ level. This is a hot topic throughout the region, especially among farmers, agricultural cooperatives and associations, foresters, water managers, environmentalists, and also local, regional, and national political representatives. The irrigation project has a number of interest groups that we can identify.

One of them includes agricultural companies, bigger farms, and cooperatives, as well as the Irrigation Hustopeče Ltd. company, which has a somewhat ambiguous, transitional position. Although they employ local people and in some cases have a long history in the area, due to their size and connection to the Czech Agrarian Chamber, which represents the interests of powerful business owners in agriculture, forestry, and the food industry, they are often perceived by small family farmers and others (environmentalists, local inhabitants, municipal councillors) as being linked to the ‘big players’ – the state and agribusiness. On the other side of the spectrum, there are small farmers and winegrowers who, in defining their interests and position in the system, often set themselves in opposition to large agribusiness and the state. From their perspective, agribusiness and the state are distant and usually unreachable, which makes any direct debate with them impossible. Other stakeholders are ‘environmentalists’, who are not very numerous, but are constantly mentioned by everyone concerned. Although this is a heterogeneous category, consisting in part of employees of The Nature Conservation Agency of the Czech Republic, which is a governmental body, and partly of environmental activists and ornithologists from environmental NGOs, in the local discourse they are perceived as ‘one bunch’, whose demands are often considered too extreme. In the view of many local inhabitants, the ‘environmentalists’ inappropriately favor nature over human beings. It makes activism inherently threatening. Activists acquired this image in the region when they protested the building of the reservoirs in the 90s, and since then have never quite rid themselves of it.

Water managers from the state-owned enterprise Dyje River Board are also important actors. As watercourse management is overseen by the state, the Dyje River Board, responsible for the Nové Mlýny reservoirs, follows instructions from state authorities. At the same time, they are obliged to consider the interests of nature; for example, they must ensure a minimum water level in rivers. Consequently, the River Board is under pressure from both environmentalists, who are protesting against raising the reservoir levels, and farmers, the Agrarian Chamber, and big agricultural companies, who are demanding an increase in the reservoir levels to have enough water for irrigation. The State Land Office (SLO), representing the interests of the state, is in a very similar position, as it plays a key role in the eventual construction of the irrigation infrastructure.

The role of local authorities is the most complicated. The construction of the irrigation system cannot be carried out without their cooperation, but at the same time, they are not sufficiently and regularly informed about the state of the project’s preparations. Small farmers and winegrowers, as well as nature conservationists and active citizens, expect the local authorities to be supportive, preventing the enforcement of the interests of any one of the powerful stakeholders. The state administration, on the other hand – mainly the River Board and SLO, urged on by the Agrarian Chamber, Irrigation Hustopeče Ltd., and large individual agricultural companies – expects unequivocal cooperation from local mayors and municipalities. Mayors and municipal councils are thus caught in the ‘crossfire’ of all stakeholders’ expectations.

The need for irrigation represents the first element in epistemic disputes. The irrigation project was initiated by a group of local farmers, supported by the Agrarian Chamber, who promote irrigation as a critical component of sustainable agriculture in the region. These stakeholders consider irrigation a principal adaptation measure to drought, and they require the state to ensure access to irrigation infrastructure. Under current climatic conditions, the Czech state is in favor of such a construction, no matter how logistically, politically, financially, and technically demanding an undertaking it is, and via the State Land Office, it has already carried out initial feasibility studies. A tiny minority of stakeholders, mainly small-scale winegrowers, argue that such an irrigation system is not necessary and that the way forward for local agriculture in the face of climate change lies in changing the types of agricultural practices and crops grown (i.e. grape varieties) and focusing on high-quality and specific products that can be produced even under changed climatic conditions.

Environmentalists opposed the irrigation project too. They question the uncritical emphasis on adaptation measures and point to the need for much more systematic mitigation strategies to face the environmental crisis and strengthen the future resilience of the landscape and society. They argue that drought adaptation should involve changing the landscape rather than expanding the role of the already questionable large reservoirs.

A vast majority of local inhabitants whose livelihoods do not depend on agriculture have no opinion, very often because they do not even know about the irrigation project.

The irrigation project requires land adjustments in the cadastral area affected by the planned route, with the aim being to build mainly on the plots of public facilities that are owned by the state or municipalities. Still, the route will certainly also cross private parcels and create easements. This element of the disputes can be seen in terms of practical feasibility. Critics stress that the building of such a large piece of infrastructure will be extremely logistically and legally demanding, will probably result in injustices, and that the vision itself is not realistic because the scale of the construction will involve untenable delays meaning the project will never have the intended effect of helping to address the already existing problem of water scarcity. Finally, there is the financial argument regarding the construction’s exorbitant cost. If the costs were to be borne by the business owners that want to make use of the irrigation infrastructure, small winegrowers and farmers would be immediately disadvantaged because the costs would be unaffordable for them.

But the debate is not primarily about whether irrigation is needed for local agriculture. The controversy lies much deeper in the experience of local people, who already witnessed the construction of such a project and learned the lesson that it brings injustices. In this sense, the discussion touched on ethical deliberational aspects, mutual trust, mutual trust, respect, and (in)equality of voice.

The water source for the irrigation system would be the Nové Mlýny dams, three reservoirs with an area of 3227 ha built between 1975 and 1990, which already caused disputes at the time of their construction. The construction was opposed both by residents of the area, whose homes and properties were flooded due to the reservoirs, and by environmentalists, who pointed to the widespread negative impacts of the reservoirs on local ecosystems. When the decision to build the dams became irreversible, environmentalists at least tried to push for lower water levels to preserve valuable ecosystems, which they only succeeded in doing to a certain extent. Eventually, the construction was pushed through, and a large piece of irrigation infrastructure was built. However, its commissioning took place just in time to coincide with the political upheaval of 1989, which was followed by a less than perfect privatization and economic transformation process; hence, the irrigation system has never been fully functional, and the existing infrastructure has been slowly deteriorating due to unclear property relations. The current debate concerning the irrigation (re)construction project is significantly influenced by this complicated past, whose traces and echoes we repeatedly encountered during the ethnographic research. The arguments and emotions regarding the irrigation system can be much better understood when we change the temporal scale and include the past and (imagined or expected) future in the analysis.

One aspect of the current debate is about respect for nature. If the irrigation system were to be (re)built, the level of the reservoir would have to be raised to ensure sufficient water supplies for irrigation. But then the water level would be above the level originally fought for by environmentalists. That would threaten the reservoirs’ existing fragile ecosystems, which gradually appeared over time, especially on the islands in the middle reservoir. The environmentalists, remembering the past and imagining the future, want to speak on behalf of nature, a silent, unheard, and continually oppressed actor:

Other stakeholders focus on complex property rights and relations that were violated because of collectivization in the 1950s and 1960s and not fully satisfactorily rehabilitated during state-led privatization after 1989. This argument is ethical in the sense that it points out potential or already committed injustices as well as the inexpediency of a megalomaniacal climate adaptation project, which is unlikely to be completed ‘fast enough’ to really help local communities foster sustainable agriculture.

This construction would, according to the interviews, have implications in terms of power distribution, since it would strengthen the position of the agribusinesses, who, according to the Czech public narrative, are unfairly favored, often due to unjust privatization in the 1990s and due to a reportedly malfunctioning subsidy system. The result of such development would be obvious: small farmers without irrigation would gradually go bankrupt. To avoid this potential injustice, local farmers are convinced that all the costs should be borne by the state, including connecting the infrastructure to individual farms and vineyards.

The issue of economically unequal conditions not only aggravates the tension between ‘agribusinesses’ and family farms but also brings into the debate the role of public actors, such as the state apparatus and the EU common agricultural policy (especially the subsidy system), both of which are, in the local discourse, framed as distant, unreachable, and not particularly interested in the problems of the Moravian countryside.

Ethical conflicts have democratic consequences. The most visible political consequence is distrust of political actors, skepticism, and civic apathy. Local people reflect on the irrigation project not only in relation to climate change adaptation but also in the context of a locally specific past from which they draw one common theme: the experience of injustice, power imbalances, unequal treatment according to position in power structures, and unfair disadvantage among small business owners and farms compared to large, powerful stakeholders. For the environmentalists, the intention to raise the water level not only represents a power imbalance between the state, powerful players, and citizens but also between humans and nature. They interpret the current developments as a fundamental violation of the only agreement from the past that represented a trade-off in favor of the environment.

As we can see, ethnographic research helped us identify key debates requiring attention in public deliberation. On the epistemic level, these are the debates regarding the necessity of irrigation, its practical feasibility, and financial arguments. However, the latter have their origins in past experiences of conflict, unjust power relations, and complicated relations between the center and periphery, which represent the ethical framing. It was crucial to anchor the whole debate in the past and include the echoes of unjust property expropriation in the 1950s and 1960s, the disputes over the reservoirs in the 1980s and 1990s, and the problematic privatization and restitution processes in the 1990s, which changed the distribution of property and power in these areas. A specific role is played by the state apparatus, which is distrusted by almost all local actors: it has been and still is perceived as an agent of oppression in relation to nature, of unmanaged privatization, and of injustice in the distribution of subsidies. On the democratic level, this distrust is bolstered by skepticism toward the great technical solutions proposed by the techno-optimistic government and powerful stakeholders (e.g. Agrarian Chamber, agribusiness). Actors’ current attitudes and agency are also based on their expectations for the future, which are marked by skepticism. This type of dispute is reminiscent of Jürgen Habermas’s (1987) concepts of conflict between the system and the lifeworld. ‘The system’ means structures and patterns of instrumental rationality and action, particularly money and power. Conversely, ‘the lifeworld’ represents the community and implies shared meaning and understanding. This conflict might be demonstrated both through historically founded distrust of large infrastructural projects and technocratic solutions and through the distrust local actors have for central actors such as the government or representatives of agrobusiness.

Ethnography as an analytical perspective and research tool helped us to identify and classify key areas of conflict and relate them to deliberative functions (see Table 2). This resulted in the identification of the main barriers to the development of deliberative capacity in relation to the individual functions of the deliberative system. The primary barrier for the epistemic function is an attachment to personal interests; for the ethical function, it is a lack of trust, and for the democratic function, the primary barrier is skepticism.

However, ethnography is not only a great methodology for the study of deliberative democracy, as described by Curato and Doerr (Citation2022). They omit ethnography as a deliberative practice, where the ethnographer, inherently reflexive and deeply immersed in the field, not only studies public deliberation but, through their very presence, also co-creates, moderates, and facilitates public deliberation.

Ethnographer as an honest broker: using ethnography as a vehicle for deliberation

Through studying local discourse, meeting people, and networking, ethnographers facilitated dialogue among local actors. Furthermore, ethnographers, as one part of an interdisciplinary research team, also met with geographers, landscape ecologists, and climatologists, who all expressed their expertise differently – in the form of maps, graphs, and numbers. They proposed specific measures that could increase the landscape’s resilience to the expected effects of climate change and modeled future scenarios demonstrating how various adaptation measures, or lack thereof, could affect the local landscape. However, on the epistemic level, the challenge lay in how to effectively communicate these rather abstract representations and translate them into local knowledge. As stated above, local actors very often perceive knowledge as biased and attached to personal interests. If expert knowledge is supposed to strengthen local deliberative capacity, it must prove to be impartial and needs to be contextualized within local knowledge and historical memory. As our project showed, ethnography is an important vehicle in this shift.

Ethnographers interpreted expert knowledge for locals, brought the local perspective to experts from other fields, and mediated expert and lay knowledge. This was possible due to the ethnographers’ immersion and participation in all the fields under study. Although they are not themselves experts in natural science, they were actively involved in collaboratively developing future scenarios. This was possible because they gradually acquired a variety of knowledge in climatology, landscape ecology, and geography, and as scientists, they could read scientific texts and were used to scientific debates, regardless of discipline. They were also perfectly familiar with the region and local actors – their power structure, concerns, experiences, plans, doubts, fears, and disputes. This allowed them to contextualize and interpret the knowledge, concerns, and actions of local actors. For example, as we have shown above, they could analyze the roots of the different understandings of the need for irrigation, depending on the actor’s experience of the past injustice and their position in power structures. The ethnographers were thus able to comprehensively and convincingly demonstrate to the natural science experts that and how the debate on irrigation is rooted far more in local social relations than in objective indicators such as evapotranspiration, type of soil and cultivated crops, erosion, etc. Another example is the opinion of some locals that it rains significantly less in their village than in the neighboring villages, due to variously specified effects of the reservoirs or the nearby Pavlov hills (500 m above sea level). The ethnographic analysis of local knowledge revealed that instead of understanding the drought as an impact of global climate change, the people may tend to interpret it as a locally specific anomaly. In both cases, the ‘translation’ of local knowledge to experts consequently led to more contextualized thinking and argumentations. Hence, with a presence in both knowledge systems, the ethnographers were able to present local knowledge to natural scientists and vice versa, making the scientific evidence and arguments accessible to non-scientists from all interest groups without fear of misrepresentation.

A good example of this kind of interaction was in informal conversations when the ethnographers were asked the obligatory ‘So what does the science say? Is there going to be a drought?’. It provided the ethnographers an opportunity to show, with the help of locally specific climate and soil erosion data, that what is experienced as increasing levels of drought is not actually due to less annual rainfall in the area but rather to changes in its distribution and intensity as well as a significant decrease in the soil’s ability to retain water. As conversations unfolded, the opportunity also arose to open the topic of the climatologists’ expectations regarding an increased risk of heat waves or a significant increase in the number of spring days with late frosts that will threaten future harvests. The aim of the discussions was not to dispute local knowledge but to suggest alternative ways of thinking about the future and about possible adaptation measures, while also considering the need to store water and build the irrigation system. This way, issues regarding appropriate landscape management, sustainable agriculture, changing the kinds of crops grown, etc., entered the debates, and influenced demands made by locals to the municipality or state administration (for example, during municipal strategic planning) or led some local farmers to consider brand new crops (for example, truffles, for which the conditions in Moravia are becoming increasingly appropriate according to climatologists), etc.

To sum up, from the perspective of the epistemic function, the benefit of the ethnographic position was its hybridity. Ethnographers were present both as scientists and laypersons and were familiar with different types of expertise. This combination meant taking on new knowledge and unfamiliar discourse. The ethnographic experience of the difficulty of learning the ‘language’ of others, be they scientists or local actors, exposed the fact that simply making information available is not enough to ensure that information is both understood and utilized. Reducing asymmetry in information and knowledge requires real dialogue between those involved. Ethnographers, as hybrid actors, could create a transitional space between scientific and local knowledge. Winnicott introduced the concept of transitional space to depict the intermediate area of experience wherein both inner reality and external shared reality co-exist (Winnicott Citation1953). In a similar vein, local and scientific understandings coexist in the ethnographer’s hybrid existence. Furthermore, the transitional space created by the ethnographer’s presence also represents a safe learning space where local actors can acquire scientific information and where, through this dialogue between scientists and the public, room for experimentation can develop.

At the ethical level, the ethnographers’ position didn’t only involve their ‘mediation’ and ‘translation’ of experts’ knowledge into locally appropriate language and a normative system. Their transparent and humble presence in the field was of equal importance: people knew them, talked to them repeatedly, and trusted that their goal was indeed to help solve the local problem of increasing drought. Hence, trust seemed another important asset of the ethnographers’ position, which contributed to the creation of a safe space for deliberation.

The ethnographers built their trusted position by being present locally for an extended period but also by repeatedly proving themselves to be impartial in discussions, capable of listening to and recognizing the voices of actors who typically go ‘unheard’: ordinary citizens, small farmers, etc. Field interactions demonstrated to the research participants that the ethnographers do not favor any party or opinion, and that they intentionally stay out of local power structures. Systematic inclusiveness, in Dryzek’s view a key aspect of deliberative capacity (Dryzek Citation2010), was demonstrated during the participative workshops aimed at the co-productive development of landscape scenarios. These workshops were deliberately designed to emphasize that the researchers did not want to one-sidedly present research findings but to share, discuss, consult, and cooperatively adjust the expert-driven exploratory scenarios if it turned out that they had not been able to properly grasp local knowledge and effectively combine it with expert knowledge. Consequently, the workshops resulted in the creation of normative participatory backcasting scenarios.

Moreover, the workshops brought together people from different interest groups, including local politicians, farmers, winegrowers, representatives of the Nature Conservation Agency, local action groups, the State Land Office, the Agrarian Chamber, environmental activists, and ordinary citizens. These actors usually meet bilaterally, sometimes even trilaterally, but they are virtually never all debate together. This introduced the possibility of conflict and never-ending disagreements, but the design of the workshops served to prevent this: participants did not have to directly confront mutually opposing views but were presented with representations of these views in the form of maps of potential future scenarios that had been prepared and thus already partially processed by the research team. The goal of the workshops was to erase asymmetries in information and knowledge by designing them around mutual benefit and respect for the knowledge of all participants. The workshops’ results demonstrated a subversion of inequalities in voice thanks to the fact that the voices of both local people from all interest groups and experts were deemed to be of equal legitimacy and importance in the design of the workshops.

Trust might be particularly valuable as a deliberative precondition in rural and peripheral regions. Participants in our study emphasized a lack of systematic structural support from the state. This corresponded with the peripheral consciousness, described by Cramer (Citation2016) as a value that leads people to define their in-group and out-group. This kind of peripheral consciousness is demonstrated by the rejection of representatives of state authorities and the elite. Without establishing mutual trust and obtaining local knowledge, deliberative attempts can fail, as local inhabitants may consider such representatives as part of an elitist project.

However, trust and dialogue between different kinds of expertise and knowledge (Parkinson and Mansbridge Citation2012) do not automatically empower collective choice and the acceptance of responsibility:

It was a very interesting meeting in which we could all actively participate. I hope that our findings will help you further address the drought issue. (A letter from a mayor to the research team after one of the workshops)

Clearly, the most complex issue was tackling the democratic function of deliberative capacity. Although ethnographers were successful in conveying expert knowledge to the local population, creating locally accepted consensus on expert input, and fostering trust between actors, this alone is not enough to overcome skepticism.

A good example of ethnography’s potential to promote the democratic function and challenge disparities in political authority was represented by its role in cooperating with representatives of the state administration, particularly the State Land Office (SLO), which participated in the research project. Due to constant communication with the relevant ministries, the River Board, and the Agrarian Chamber, the SLO remains the most well-informed and up to date on the actual status of the irrigation project. Through our cooperation, we were able to mediate the information between the locality and the Office, helping to bridge the perceived gap between locals and ‘the State’. We could informally update less informed actors on the irrigation project’s progress and alert the SLO to local challenges regarding the irrigation plan that were not communicated to the SLO through official channels or the feasibility study. Documentation provided by the SLO was also utilized in the experts’ creation of potential future scenarios, which were discussed at the participative workshops in the localities, and conversely, the participatory normative scenarios that emerged from the workshops were introduced to the SLO.

During their interactions with the SLO, the most significant aspect of the ethnographers’ position was their expertise. To use Collins and Evans’ terminology (Collins and Evans Citation2002), this expertise was both interactional (focusing on interaction among actors) and institutionally recognized. Being an expert means holding the social status of someone who possesses reliable knowledge about a certain topic (Eyal Citation2019; Krick Citation2022). As representatives of academia, ethnographers enjoyed better access to institutional actors, could easily establish contact with experts, and were perceived as trustworthy translators of various types of knowledge and arguments. This also helped to scale up research findings, facilitate contact between local actors and central public authorities, and influence central policies using local knowledge, which is, according to Dryzek (Citation2010) a key practice supporting deliberative capacity. The ethnographers’ expertise proved to be recognized more broadly in the institutional and governmental fields, allowing them to participate in various fora and represent local voices.

The three benefits of the ethnographer’s position correspond with the three deliberative functions mentioned by Parkinson and Mansbridge (Citation2012) and refer to each of the three power asymmetries (in voice, information and knowledge, and political authority) described by Curato, Hammond and Min (Citation2019) – see Table 3. Hybridity allows for a more effective translation of different kinds of expertise in a safe environment; trust strengthens the association of local citizens with deliberative events; and expertise expands the potential for scaling up local deliberative outputs.

Concluding remarks

This study started with the observation that ethnography has the potential to strengthen local deliberative systems. We see ethnography both as a way to study local policies and as a social practice that might have deliberative consequences. We employ three functions of the deliberative system (Parkinson and Mansbridge Citation2012): (1) the epistemic, (2) the ethical, and (3) the democratic function, and link them to power imbalances identified by Curato, Hammond and Min (Citation2019) and Dryzek’s three aspects of deliberative capacity. Through its hybridity, trust-building potential, and recognized expertise, ethnography as a social practice is relevant in all three fields.

In our study, ethnography helped local citizens express their experiences of injustice, power imbalances, and the unfair disadvantages faced by small business owners in comparison to powerful stakeholders while also assisting in translating these feelings for other actors. Temporal and spatial scaling contextualized local debates and allowed for a more adequate analysis of local tensions, disputes, unwillingness to cooperate or listen to each other, and distrust in institutions and the state.

Ethnographic research could serve as an essential foundation for further public deliberation in such cases of policy disputes where expert knowledge meets with a high level of distrust in the state and its institutions. However, from the perspective of deliberative capacity theory, while ethnography as a reflexive, transparent, reciprocal, and indiscriminate methodology scores very well in terms of authenticity and inclusivity, it is lacking in consequentiality. Knowledge improvement and voice-giving alone cannot guarantee that local actors’ arguments and attitudes will ultimately be included in policy decisions. Although our project partly succeeded in the implementation of the participatory workshop results (which were used in local strategic planning and introduced to the SLO), it would be an overstatement to say that they contributed significantly to local decision-making. The rather low impact of participatory processes on policy decisions is a weakness identified by many studies on participation (Hügel and Davies Citation2020; Nalau and Cobb Citation2022), which highlights the fact that consequentiality needs to be systematically reinforced through a robust embedding of the research process within deliberative decision-making cycles. This has its limitations in terms of money, time, and organization; in the case of ethnography, the requirement for long-term and in-depth field research, which is expensive and time-consuming. Therefore, sufficient financial and human resources are required for the incorporation of ethnography into the deliberative work of academics or practitioners, which may restrict the applicability of this approach to routine decision-making processes. On the other hand, the identification of hybridity, trust-building, and expertise as ethnography’s principal contributions to the improvement of local deliberative systems is also useful for other deliberative practices. This aspect of ethnography’s use in deliberative processes needs further exploration.

We postulate that by tackling power imbalances, ethnography can strengthen and transform everyday political discourse into more deliberative forms, and through ethnographers’ fieldwork, projections of climate change could be included in everyday political discourse. But the most significant strength of ethnography is its trust-building potential. Trust in public institutions will be one of the prerequisites for the stability of societies that will have to face the harsh effects of the climate crisis. Future societies will have to show solidarity, and public authorities will need to demonstrate improved reliability and legitimacy, as their role in a world threatened by global warming will be vital. In addition to upholding democratic principles, maximizing civic participation in decision-making represents a means of fostering trust, as this model of political decision-making brings much-needed solidarity to the public sphere.