By Marion Jay, Gonzalo Cortés Capano, Laura Kmoch and Tobias Plieninger.
2. Gonzalo Cortés Capano (biography)
3. Laura Kmoch (biography)
4. Tobias Plieninger (biography)
How can studies make use of the unique potential of participatory storytelling to explore the complex interrelations between people and places? How can researchers and local communities co-create rich, place-based narratives in dynamic and inclusive ways?
Participatory storytelling is a collaborative approach in which participants are co-creators of both their stories and the research results. As both a research method and a space for dialogue, participatory storytelling helps bridge knowledge and action while supporting more reflexive and transformative practices. By focusing on the lived experiences and voices of diverse actors, it reveals the values, emotions, and power dynamics that shape social-ecological systems.
Here we provide practical guidance for undertaking participatory storytelling. While our focus is on place-based narratives, the guidance is more widely applicable.
Process
Participatory storytelling typically involves four phases. While participation may not occur in every phase, meaningful impact on the research process and outcomes during one of the four phases is essential for participatory storytelling.
- The research design phase includes the development of the research questions and storytelling approaches, and decisions on the level of participation. In the design phase, participants can be engaged, for instance, through pre-project workshops to collaboratively identify relevant issues, define research questions, and select storytelling formats.
- The data collection phase entails a co-creation process between researchers and participants that aims to generate detailed, temporally-structured narratives of lived experiences. Questions are phrased openly to stimulate conversation, using various formats, including semi-structured interviews, oral history, walking interviews, narrative reports, workshops, arts-based methods, and videos. Participation may be enhanced through open-ended approaches that enable storytelling on the participants’ own terms, using their preferred methods.
- The analysis phase comprises thematic analysis of the generated stories. This involves identifying key story elements (setting, actors, challenge, action, tensions, and resolution), interrogating the participants’ interpretations of events, and exploring connections between individuals’ stories and societal structures.
- The interpretation phase focuses on surfacing values, meanings, and implications of the participants’ stories through review and reflection. The researchers and participants may, for example, identify key underlying beliefs, emotions, and converging or diverging story framings. In phases 3 and 4, participation can be upheld using iterative cycles of researcher-led analysis and collective sense-making, inviting participants to reflect on, refine, or reframe the researchers’ results based on their own interpretations. Finally, sets of stories can be presented through vignettes, audio recordings, or videos that capture their essence.
Skills and resources
No specific skills are required of participants, beyond a willingness to engage. The emphasis on storytelling can even support participation, as it leverages how people naturally make sense of their daily experiences.
Researchers need at least a basic knowledge of qualitative empirical research, as well as additional skills depending on the approach to data collection and analysis. They also need to engage in reflexivity regarding their own positions, which can be fostered using fieldwork notes.
Finally, it is essential to plan resources, adapt flexibly to the ongoing participatory process, communicate transparently with participants, and consider data sensitivity and privacy issues.
Key strengths
Key strengths of participatory storytelling are:
- capturing complexity and plural perspectives on social-ecological systems in understandable ways. It provides space for a wide range of knowledge holders to express their diverse values, views, and interests.
- fostering nuanced interpretations of local voices through a research process that emphasizes co-creation and co-interpretation. It generates narrative data that convey emotion, thus bringing to the fore how people value and care for landscapes.
- surfacing stories that might otherwise remain untold or unaccounted for in broader debates on sustainability and other issues. In doing so, it mobilizes communities, fosters connections among people and with nature and place, and bridges knowledge and action, for instance when the results are used to inform environmental conflict management.
- being adapted to varied research contexts and available resources. It lends itself to being combined with other participatory methods to investigate and guide transitions. For instance, its use in participatory scenario planning can support a more inclusive process.
- complementing quantitative approaches.
Key challenges
Key challenges of participatory storytelling are:
- transferring research results to other locations, as the stories are place-specific. Nevertheless, the analysis and interpretation phases reveal patterns of values and how local stories relate to broader societal or policy narratives, thus linking place-based insights with larger debates.
- potentially misinterpreting narratives as static descriptions of social-ecological systems. It is therefore important to recognize―and emphasize when communicating results―that stories convey participants’ subjective interpretations at a given point in time.
- attending to issues of power, and reflecting on who tells whose stories. Different methods and levels of participation may therefore be used to fit different research contexts, account for power dynamics, and adapt to local conditions.
- exacerbating tensions when participants’ stories echo contentious societal debates beyond the studied case. Building a good understanding of relevant societal or policy discussions, and fostering awareness within the research team that stories can polarize or be strategically used to divide, can help researchers navigate such situations.
Conclusion
With its relational underpinning, participatory storytelling provides a space for people to connect with others and with a plurality of stories. It contributes to collective meaning-making, with the potential to shift values, behaviours and actions, thereby supporting transformative change efforts.
What’s your experience with participatory storytelling? Do you have other process tips to share? Or additional strengths and challenges?
To find out more:
Jay, M., Cortés Capano, G., Kmoch, L. and Plieninger, T. (2026). Participatory storytelling: Participatory research methods for sustainability. Toolkit #17. GAIA, 35, 2: 93–95. (Online): https://doi.org/10.14512/gaia.35.2.6
Much of this i2Insights contribution is taken verbatim from this article, which also provides references.
To see all blog posts from the partnership with the journal GAIA: https://i2insights.org/tag/partner-gaia-journal/.
Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Statement: Artificial intelligence was not used in the development of this i2Insights contribution or the work on which the contribution is based. (For i2Insights policy on artificial intelligence please see https://i2insights.org/contributing-to-i2insights/guidelines-for-authors/#artificial-intelligence.)
Biography: Marion Jay PhD is a senior researcher in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development, University of Göttingen and Faculty of Organic Agricultural Sciences, University of Kassel, Germany. In her research, she explores how governance can support multifunctional practices in cultural landscapes and foster social capacities for change. In particular, she uses participatory methods to investigate the role of agriculture and forestry as land-use systems central to sustainability issues.
Biography: Gonzalo Cortés Capano PhD is a Humboldt Fellow postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development, University of Göttingen and Faculty of Organic Agricultural Sciences, University of Kassel, Germany. His research explores how landscape narratives, justice and governance shape pathways of rural transformations. He uses participatory and narrative approaches to understand and foster more plural and just forms of landscape change.
Biography: Laura Kmoch PhD is a research associate at the University of Göttingen and a Guest Researcher at the University of Kassel, Germany. Her research interests include rural livelihoods, land system dynamics, and sustainability transformations in forest and agricultural landscapes.
Biography: Tobias Plieninger PhD is a professor for social-ecological interactions in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development, University of Göttingen and Faculty of Organic Agricultural Sciences, University of Kassel, Germany. He is a sustainability scientist with a commitment to inter- and trans- disciplinary research at the social-ecological interface. In particular, he studies rural landscape change, ecosystem services, and sustainability transformations.
when do you have a webinar
I wanted to participate
regards
Peter
Dear Peter, thanks, we do not have any webinar planned yet on this particular topic. I’ll advertise any future activities on LinkedIn!
Thank you for making your insights about participatory storytelling visible, and for subtly modelling it by inviting stories about participatory storytelling. Brilliant. The conclusion of your article is an opening to an infinite number of stories.
Your research question makes me think of this reframing:
“What opens up when we make use of the unique potential of participatory storytelling to explore the complex interrelations between people and places?”
For example, perhaps what opens up are trajectories that transcend the very frame of the question itself. I have found participatory storytelling can be quite provocative: several times, I found myself holding stories that challenged my own assumptions about the very container and boundaries being held. That’s because stories, when freed from the expectation, explicit or implicit, to perform, travel further than the horizon of our own journey.
We can easily discount the research design phase as a condition for participatory storytelling. You make this explicit, which models your own aspiration. That’s great. I would add this: across cultures, spaces and places, I have noticed a phenomenon that a friend articulated better than I can. People look for what is possible to say, what is useful to express, and what posture is beneficial to hold, given who is in the room and who has power. A question such as “identify issues that are relevant for you” is fraught with entangled vested interests. I say this without judging the behaviour, but rather observing (in myself too) the natural human tendency to wonder: who can I show up as here? (to borrow and rephrase an expression from Nora Bateson’s Warm Data Labs). So I find storytelling (without calling it storytelling) helpful here: using arts-based methods, embodied experiences and other ways to reveal what really matters WITHOUT asking what really matters. Sometimes, the body knows best. How might a research design embody indirect ways of asking a question, to better reveal the answer?
That’s the other aspect I find helpful in participatory storytelling: letting go of “telling,” and inviting ourselves and others into a place of embodying… without words. Sometimes without processing, or even trying to make meaning. What is expressed without being spoken, without writing words on sticky notes, is also a way of accessing stories. This reminds me of a principle in literature, “show, don’t tell,” which can also be a mechanism in participatory storytelling, though it sits in some tension with the need and expectation to tell.
“How do you tell a story that cannot be said, but is revealed?” is an inquiry I continuously carry.
A word on something I didn’t realize early on: laughter is a way to process trauma. What does this open up in terms of “methods”? What does it reveal in terms of “interpretation”?
Finally, I find storytelling helpful for engaging other stakeholders. Rather than “only” presenting findings in a book, outlining recommendations on a PowerPoint, or debating results on a panel, participatory storytelling can continue with decision-makers and influencers by inviting them, through generative dialogue and reflexivity, to embark on their own participatory storytelling. As they connect deeply with what really matters and then turn to the pages of the report, they see the “evidence” and “lessons learned” with fresh eyes, and bold actions become noticeable, such as stewarding conditions or recognizing where a small difference can make a big difference.
But that’s a story for another time. Some of my own dissonance have been captured on my Substack (free): Here is an example: https://learningpartneredge.substack.com/p/who-is-teaching-whom?r=80fib7 and the background for writing stories about challenging our thinking here: https://learningpartneredge.substack.com/p/whole-catch-estuary-storybook-introduction?r=80fib7&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Thank you for the invitation to reflect, share and learn from what you learned.
Dear Fodé Beaudet, thank you for sharing your thoughts, great reflections. Indeed the need to perform is a very strong force behind our interactions, as I experience it in research with land users or decision makers. By reading your experiences it is clear that the space for telling one own’s story is full of expectations, and it reminded me of situations where stories cannot be freed of these expectations. I fully agree this is something a research process and researchers’ team has to, and can, work with. For instance by allowing reflexive moments despite potential pressures – time, project restrictions…- and engaging thoroughly with the context in which the study takes place, to be able to adapt carefully to it and its underlying relationships. Sometimes the research process has to accommodate formal interaction spaces, that might not allow for embodied experiences or more creative arts-based methods. This is where I see one important strength of storytelling: it can be flexibly adapted to different situations and stakeholders, and eventually lead to revealing stories that wouldn’t have been “said”. Happy to continue learning from others’ experiences and ideas.
Thank you for sharing these reflections. Storytelling is such a rich means of engaging with lived experience. I enjoyed your account of participatory storytelling. This 2025 blog offers some reflections on an invitational storytelling process that brought together experiences from contributors in many different contexts as part of an initiative on “decolonising knowledge for development”. It is still an ongoing process of reflection, so a nice opportunity to continue to draw lessons. Thank you again. https://www.developmentresearch.eu/?p=2096
Dear Peter Taylor, thank you for your feedback, happy to read more case studies and examples of storytelling or similar approaches!