Storytelling for sustainable development in rural communities: An alternative approach

Abstract

Mainstream conceptualizations of sustainable development (SD) tend to focus on urban areas or the national or global scale-most recently through the Sustainable Development Goals. This focus often overlooks rural and natural resource-based communities, particularly those dependent on renewable resources like fisheries or forestry. Drawing from a comprehensive review, we propose an alternative approach for interpreting and measuring SD in these contexts. We integrate two seemingly contradictory approaches: sustainability indicators (SIs), whose evolution reflects competing views of the nature of knowledge and action in pursuit of SD, and the use of storytelling in policy and planning, highlighting how actors tell stories to garner support for proposed developments, influence public understanding, and mobilize stakeholders. Examining the opposing epistemologies often underlying these two approaches, we posit that they can be brought together through a transdisciplinary lens for sustainable rural development. We illustrate these potentials in Newfoundland and Labrador, a highly resource-based region in which rural communities are often characterized by deficiencies based narratives. In such contexts, storytelling can allow rural stakeholders to interpret SD while potentially enlisting SIs in telling their own sustainability stories.

Indicator‐based assessment of local and regional progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): An integrated approach from Romania

“…We identified two major gaps in the relevant literature: a strong focus on the national scale and a spatial focus on cities. Accordingly, based also on our previous study (Nagy, Benedek, & Ivan, 2018) and some recent research (Lowery, Dagevos, Chuenpagdee, & Vodden, 2020), we argue strongly that rural areas may not been left outside the SDG analysis. They are generally peripheral and marginalized areas, and, in addition, in the specific case of Romania, they concentrate broadly half of the country total population (Benedek & Lembcke, 2017;Török & Benedek, 2018).…”

Goal-Driven or Data-Driven? Inventory of Sustainability Indicator Initiatives in Rural Canada

“…In contrast, a number of rural stakeholders have used these tools in more participatory ways, highlighting potential overlaps between these approaches and collaborative regional governance efforts [23,24]. These more nuanced approaches to measuring rural SD conditions often drew on local knowledge and stories, supporting recent research proposing that storytelling can be used to enrich local SI tools and mobilize rural stakeholders [142]. Demonstrated in our typology of rural SI use, this collaborative approach can engage a diverse range of stakeholders in setting a locally grounded sustainability agenda while providing essential context to interpret quantitative indicators.…”

Food for all: designing sustainable and secure future seafood systems

“…The three narratives were created to reflect the varied ways in which the future, under current ongoing trajectories, might be experienced by different people. This reflection included rural and natural resource‐based communities that are often overlooked in mainstream conceptualisations of sustainable development (Lowery et al 2020 ). The use of narratives allowed the co-authors to explore and envisage how the drivers might shape the future in 2030 in different contexts, without being overwhelmed by dystopian visions of irreversible environmental degradation and societal collapse that have tended to dominate other future scenario work (Bennett et al 2016 ; Raudsepp-Hearne et al 2019 ).…”