About the project

Aims

This project aims to explore with members of the public, their views in regard to bioenergy, and consider those views in our strategy and policy development in bioenergy.

We will also be piloting a novel approach to public dialogue, to develop an ongoing, informed discussion between ourselves, our research community, the public and other stakeholders, around bioenergy research.

Objectives

To facilitate discussions between the BBSRC scientific community involved in bioenergy research and members of the public
To identify public views, concerns and aspirations about the science, social implications, and ethics of bioenergy research
To raise awareness within BBSRC of the needs and views of the public in relation to bioenergy
To inform our strategy and policy setting around bioenergy
To disseminate our findings to key stakeholders, for example, the government
To develop and test a novel, flexible model of dialogue for discussion of complex issues that enables engagement with a large group of people nationwide

Public dialogue events

As part of the project, we will be running public dialogue events, and we would like to encourage bioenergy researchers and other interested groups to run their own events.

The toolkit

To run public dialogue events we have developed a 'Bioenergy Dialogue Toolkit'. It has been designed to generate discussion on the impact of bioenergy on society.

This toolkit includes resources such as 'Future scenarios' and the Democs card game. It comes with guidelines that will help you plan your event and explanations on how to use the resources. More information about these resources is available on the ' Take part ' page.

Collecting feedback

In order to collect feedback from the events we developed:

Generic activities to identify the main issues discussed at dialogue events (these are part of the toolkit)
Participant feedback form to collect general views from the public on bioenergy and understand who has taken part
Organiser feedback form to understand the usefulness of the toolkit to researchers and other interest groups and how future dialogue events can be improved

Visit the ' Take part ' page to learn how you can participate in the project.

Marta Entradas, Bioenergy Dialogue Coordinator
marta.entradas@bbsrc.ac.uk
tel: 01793 413325