Building Consensus for Sustainable Pest Management in California

This case study was written by Sabine Virani.

Summary

After a widely used but toxic pesticide was banned in California with limited warning, stakeholders in the state’s agriculture sector called for a holistic and collaborative approach to transforming pest management. Using Convergent Facilitation, a highly diverse group of stakeholders developed a roadmap for an accelerated transition away from high-risk pesticides toward the adoption of safer and sustainable pest control practices by 2050. Every word in the document was agreed through consensus, and the roadmap is now used daily by state regulators.

Setting the scene

Farming is big business in California. The state produces over one third of the USA’s vegetables and nearly three-quarters of its fruits and nuts. In 2022, its farmers and ranchers received nearly $56 billion in cash receipts; in 2021, state agricultural exports were worth $22.5 billion. And yet farmers generally operate with very small profit margins. So decisions by agriculture regulators have far-reaching consequences.

In May 2019, the California’s Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA) announced a forthcoming ban on the use of the chlorpyrifos, a widely used pesticide associated with serious health effects, including impaired brain development. Sales would end in early February 2020, and virtually all uses of chlorpyrifos would be banned after 31 December that same year. These were short timescales. The ban would protect public health, farm workers and the environment, but it would leave many farmers in a bind, with no clear alternatives.

Following the announcement, regulators established a cross-sector work group that met over five months to figure out a way forward for farmers. One of the group’s recommendations was for regulators to move beyond a chemical-by-chemical approach in future, and to instead take a holistic and collaborative approach to transforming pest management across California. They recommended establishing a follow-on group with even greater breadth and depth of expertise, and with longer time scales, to develop a collaborative approach to addressing this complex issue.

Using Convergent Facilitation

So it was agreed to reimagine pesticide management for the state of California. Three regulatory bodies – CalEPA, the Department for Pesticides Regulation (DPR), and the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) – jointly sponsored a work group whose task was to develop a roadmap from then until 2050, a timeline fixed by the governor. Ag Innovations was hired to oversee the work, and Aimee Ryan, a Senior Facilitator, took the lead.

As someone deeply rooted in the consciousness of nonviolence, Aimee pitched to use Convergent Facilitation (CF) as a framework for this project. The start-up phase began in October 2020, and Aimee conducted some 50 interviews to identify individuals who were genuinely willing to collaborate, and who collectively represented the required cross-section of stakeholders. Originally, the plan was to have 15-20 people in the group. But this number ballooned to 39, to ensure the necessary breadth of perspectives and expertise: regulatory agencies; farm workers; different types of farmers (conventional, organic and agroecological growers); tribal representatives; environmental groups; commodities (in this case, the Almond Board and California Citrus Mutual); the lead scientist from a study on chlorpyrifos and child development; the director of University of California Integrated Pest Management; industry (Bayer Crop Science, which owns Monsanto); licensed pest control advisors; county agriculture commissioners; as well as stakeholders for a parallel process to address urban pest management.

By April 2021, the group launched and began with Phase 1: gathering the essence of what matters to people in a way that is noncontroversial to all the other stakeholders. The resulting set of statements became the group’s guiding principles. According to Aimee, “This phase took longer than there was energy for. But it created a lot of alignment and buy-in early in the process.”

Aimee also ensured that the essence of CF – the core principles, the language and the consciousness – was embedded in the group: “Almost every time we met, there was reference to ‘everyone’s needs matter’, ‘we’re not done until this is something that works for everybody’ or ‘a world that works for everyone is possible’. Whenever someone went into ‘either/or’ thinking, I asked, ‘How can we reframe this so that these two things aren’t at odds with each other? How do we look at it differently? Where’s the creative flow, so that we can see the ways in which there’s space for those things to co-exist?’ There were some really hot debates that felt gridlocked for months, and inviting everyone into thinking through a ‘both/and’ lens was a huge part of this process. That, to me, was what made this process possible.”

To ensure the roadmap would be a consensus document, Aimee made it clear that nobody would be forced to agree on anything. If there were areas some parties could not agree to, nobody would be asked to give up on what they cared about. There would be no voting, with inherent winners and losers. Instead, the group would simply declare that they hadn’t come up with a solution yet, offer their best thinking, and call out to the wider community to help figure out how to integrate these needs as a next step. “We didn’t want to go down this route, and we didn’t have to in the end, but it offered a pressure release valve.”

Innovation: Combining CF with Systems Practice

Phase 2 of a CF process focuses on developing proposals which meet the guiding principles identified in Phase 1. The work group wanted a strategic framework to support them at this stage, so when Phase 2 began in November 2021, Ag Innovations colleague Katy Mamen joined the project. Katy is an expert in systems theory and practice, a useful framework for making sense of complex systems like pest management. This was the first time that CF and Systems Practice were combined, and it proved fruitful.

With support from Ag Innovations, the work group identified the dynamics and feedback loops that make the state’s pest management system operate the way it does. They used this information to create a visual, interactive map which also indicated eleven leverage points in the system – places where, if strategic pressure were applied, we would expect to see significant transformation throughout the system. One such leverage point was improving the pesticide registration processes, including how long it takes and how transparent it is. Another was changing how universities fund and conduct research. Once the group aligned on the most potent leverage points, they used these to develop proposals for creating a healthier pest management system.

Final Phases and Results

With proposals pulled together into a draft roadmap, Phase 3 of the process began in the summer of 2022. This phase focused on gathering wider stakeholder input: work group members shared the draft proposals with the constituencies they represented. This allowed more perspectives, insights and ideas to be considered. It also presented challenges, as constituents hadn’t been part of the trust-building process that work group members had experienced.

By September, the fourth and final phase began, which involved integrating all that feedback from Phase 3 and ironing out final areas of divergence. Aimee notes, “We talked a lot about willingness and preferences in the group. Particularly toward the end, we said over and over, ‘What’s it going to take for you to sign off? For you to put your name on this?’ Sometimes that was the deletion of certain words or phrases, sometimes it was the inclusion of certain words or phrases.”

The work group finished in December 2022. California now has a 95-page roadmap, every single word of which has been agreed by consensus. People may not love every word, but everyone was willing to sign their names to the document. The head of DPR uses it regularly, and it’s been discussed at different conferences. It makes policy recommendations, names what the regulators need to do differently, and calls for changes in funding and research models. And through the process, participants learned to stretch their perspectives, to hold together what matters for everyone, and to find creative, ‘both/and’ approaches to pest management.

Learning and Reflections

Having decision makers in the room signals trust. One big win from the beginning was that all the agencies had decision makers on the working group. They weren’t in the background as advisors: they were in the conversation, present at all the meetings and invested in the process. That made the groups work real for all the other stakeholders.

Case in point, Karen Morrison, Chief Deputy Director of CA DPR, was both a client of the project and a participant. She and her new director Julie Henderson attended every meeting, and they were on calls with participants between meetings. “Our commitment signaled to the rest of the group ‘we’re in on this process’ and instilled trust and confidence in the process.” As a facilitator, Katy also observed that this was one of the remarkable aspects of this project: leaders staying in the fire of really challenging conversations.

Slow but logarithmic. Regarding the amount of time invested up front to set ground rules and establish collective goals, Karen Morrison noted that it was unusual. She says the pace felt slow, but described it as logarithmic: “that slow movement at the beginning set the foundation for us to be able to have this rapid coming together of ideas and recommendations at the end.”

Listening across differences and aligning with complexity. Katy credits Aimee with creating the conditions for participants to work across differences. “The relationships that were formed between people who would never have been in the same room together actually listened to and heard each other - it was really powerful. Several members spoke to how transformative that was.”

Katy reflected further: “When people can come together across real differences, and listen to and understand each other, it’s a personally transformative experience: people go away changed.” And from a systems perspective, “by bringing people together from across the system to identify ways forward, you really do find strategies and approaches that are much more durable and robust, and that don’t produce as many unintended consequences in these complex systems. The more we as facilitators can align with complexity, the more we’re going to have a chance of making change in this very broken world.”

Including constituent voices. One element that didn’t work so well was the public engagement process held in summer 2022, when work group members shared the draft roadmap with their communities. Up to that point, the process had been quite closed. Aimee reflects, “We had just spent a year and a half getting people together, really understanding each other’s perspectives, being able to hold each other’s needs. Even if they didn’t like or didn’t really agree with them, they could trust in the process. When people went back into their organizations for their constituents’ input, we asked them to act as bridges. But when we came back together in September, people came back re-entrenched. Then we only had until December to integrate all the feedback and iron out all the divergences, some of which were significant. So there was a rushed energy at the end, and some people felt pressure to sign off on it.” Aimee would have preferred to have facilitated those meetings, or to have included more constituent voices during Phase 1 (agreeing to the guiding principles). But within the constraints of time and budget, these were not options.

Support for the facilitator. This was a significant project, one of the largest CF processes undertaken so far. Aimee had some support from CF founder Miki Kashtan and CF facilitator Paul Kahawatte early on in the process and again near the end. But for a significant period in the middle, Aimee felt that she had unplugged from support for staying connected to the spirit of CF – a world that works for all. “Inside, I was deeply burnt out. I was soul-tired. That might have been rectified if I had had more contact with Miki and Paul. I might have been able to bring more zhuzh to the group.” She recommends never going it alone, and always having a team that is rooted in the paradigm and consciousness that you’re working from.

Where to start. Another reflection from Aimee is that it could be interesting to facilitate a process which starts with systems assessment rather than CF, in order to build a shared narrative about what’s shaping the system, what the driving processes are, and what’s in the way of getting to the end goal. Aimee reflects, “It might work well to build a sense of togetherness through the systems assessment process, instead of starting with Phase 1 of the CF process. I’m really curious what that would look like. People have an inherent desire to get to the real work, and it can be hard for some to see that agreeing the guiding principles is the real work! By doing systems work first, people might have had more appetite for developing the guiding principles.”

Reflections on the outcome. As a final reflection, it is interesting to note that – by design – the roadmap is not and will not be enacted in law. Legal statutes are a particular kind of intervention, and true systems change requires a much broader set of interventions. This roadmap, with its focus on the wider system, is shaping what the California Department of Pesticide Regulations does, who they are hiring and their internal workings, while also shaping the actions of other stakeholders, in ways that a law wouldn’t touch. It also provides guidance that lays out a plan, funding mechanisms, and programs to prioritize pesticides for reduction and to transition away from the use of high-risk pesticides. California will likely have some new law and regulations that come from this work at some point, but the Roadmap will stand regardless.

Closing

In closing, as wide as the gap still may seem between a consciousness of nonviolence and the world as most people know it, the state of California has now used CF in a very real way to address a highly charged field with significant repercussions for people, the environment and the economy. And given the national and international significance of California food production, there is potential for this approach to have a wide ripple effect on pest management globally.

Related Links:

Link to the roadmap (Accelerating Sustainable Pest Management: a Roadmap for California): https://www.cdpr.ca.gov/docs/sustainable_pest_management_roadmap/spm_roadmap.pdf

Ag Innovations article: https://aginnovations.org/building-consensus-a-look-inside-ag-innovations-multi-stakeholder-work-in-sustainable-pest-management/

Ag Innovations case study PDF: https://aginnovations.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Building-Consensus-FINAL-42224.pdf

Recommended reading on systems practice for CF practitioners: Omidyar’s Systems Practice Workbook.
https://oecd-opsi.org/toolkits/systems-practice-workbook/

About Aimee

Aimee Ryan is a Senior Facilitator at Ag Innovations, where she leads multi-stakeholder groups to collaboratively develop solutions that truly work for everyone. Aimee brings over a decade of facilitation, mediation and conflict transformation, and collaborative decision-making experience to her work supporting groups and complex change initiatives.

Learn more about Aimee here: https://aginnovations.org/about-us/ag-innovations-team/#toggle-id-6

About Sabine