Livestock and Local Community Relationships 2020-21

The 2020-21 Livestock and Local Communities (LLC) cohort was given the challenge to “create a model(s) of relationships between food animal production, local resources, and stakeholders based on history, that identify future opportunities for stability and resilience in these relationships” for a series of counties in North Carolina.

The cohort conducted a series of stakeholder interviews and developed the following representation (Figure 1) on the evolution of their knowledge and the research question. As the interviews continued, adoption of technology (or lack thereof) in waste management emerged as a theme.

Figure 1. The evolution of perceived knowledge and the research question involved testing assumptions and sometimes having those assumptions disproven. This illustration is a qualitative estimate made retrospectively by the cohort.

Drawing on concepts from fields outside of their own disciplinary training, the cohort developed a transdisciplinary method of stakeholder analysis. Their model is shown below (Figure 2).

Figure 2. A stakeholder analysis using concepts from multiple fields of study and a summary equation developed by the cohort. This approach was used to estimate power or influence of different stakeholder groups.

The cohort used that analysis to evaluate several scenarios, three of which are shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Scenarios evaluated using the cohort’s stakeholder analysis model and the predicted change in power dimensions in each scenario.

Livestock and Local Community Relationships 2020-21

Livestock and Local Communities 2021 Symposium Presentation