Participatory storytelling

By Marion Jay, Gonzalo Cortés Capano, Laura Kmoch and Tobias Plieninger.

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.