FRAMEwork and the Future
- Taskscape Associates
- Jul 22, 2020
- 3 min read
Updated: Oct 8
Thoughts from Alastair Simmons, Deputy Project Coordinator and Communications Lead, Taskscape, at the project's online Kick-Off Meeting...
When we all launched the FRAMEwork project, we knew we faced a fundamental challenge: how do we inform lasting change in European farming systems?
Reflecting on Taskscape's role supporting the project, and as a fellow of the UK's RSA, I've recently been reading their interesting report, 'A Stitch in Time: Realising the value of futures and foresight'.
This report offers a crucial insight: the way we think about and communicate our future directly shapes how we act in the present. For FRAMEwork, this means we can't simply document what's happening in our Advanced Farmer Clusters or Citizen Observatory areas. We need to actively help inform new narratives about collective land management, biodiversity-sensitive farming, and the power of community-driven change. As the report starkly puts it, if we're not enabling a thriving future on our planet today, we're colonising our own tomorrow.
Breaking the Short-Term Trap
One of our biggest challenges is overcoming the incentives that drive short-termism in agriculture. Farmers face immediate pressures – market demands, weather uncertainties, regulatory requirements. Yet biodiversity loss and ecosystem destabilisation demands long-term thinking and action.
Our solution is to develop communication strategies with and for the project that make challenges immediately relevant. To show how engaging with biodiversity can help farmers feel more connected to their land and communities right now – being supported, not blamed, as my fellow speaker today Jess Brooks (GWCT) aptly put it when discussing the successes of the UK Farmer Cluster Network on which we're all building.
As a research-in action-project, FRAMEwork isn't simply producing reports for academic audiences. We're building what I call a "dynamic conversation" – not just information transfer, but genuine participation and application. This means:
Telling fresh stories about collective approaches to land management through our farmer clusters
Creating accessible tools and training modules that speak directly to farmers' needs
Building bridges between citizen science, data sharing, and practical farming decisions
Exploring "futures literacy" across all our stakeholder groups.
Two Truths in Tension
There's a paradox we have to embrace: successful projects need both rigorous documentation of what they're doing (a traditional approach) AND active creation of discourse (a dynamic approach). Like a sign that says "Do Not Read This Sign," these two needs can often feel in opposition.
Our approach in WP1 is to help build parallel, interconnected, project workflows:
Project Management systems support rigorous documentation, data integrity, and scientific validity
Communications, Knowledge Exchange and Participation focuses on story-telling, and building out collective impacts
Both are essential, and will help us achieve our ambitious goal of prototyping collective approaches to biodiversity-sensitive farming systems across Europe.
What This Means in Practice
As we move forward, you'll see FRAMEwork:
Hosting participatory workshops that challenge conventional thinking about farm management
Developing multimedia content that brings farmer experiences to life
Creating platforms for genuine dialogue between scientists, farmers, and citizens
Building tools that help all stakeholders think beyond immediate constraints
Taskscape is currently preparing a dedicated virtual co-working platform for the project to best support your work, as internal communications is also vital.
An Invitation to Shape the Future
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us both our societal vulnerabilities and our remarkable capacity for collective action. Individual behavior changes, when multiplied across communities, can have enormous impacts.
FRAMEwork is harnessing this same principle for biodiversity conservation - to not just study futures for European farming, but actively pilot them. And we'll need diverse voices, perspectives, and experiences to ensure the futures we're exploring are ones that our stakeholders find useful.
Whether you're a farmer wondering about sustainable practices, a citizen interested in biodiversity, or a researcher exploring new approaches, FRAMEwork is creating spaces for your contribution. Because as researchers continue to show me - thinking about the future isn't just an academic exercise, it's about taking action today to choose a better world, so that tomorrow those options, ecosystems and choices aren't gone.
Alastair Simmons is WP1 lead for Communications, Knowledge Exchange and Participation at partner Taskscape Associates. He became the project's Deputy Coordinator in 2023, following Dr Benedetto Ruggani's transition from project partner LIST to Italy's National Research Council (CNR). For more on getting involved with FRAMEwork's activities, contact us.
