Co-creation for change: engaging urban community gardeners in the development of insect conservation interventions

Urban community gardens are socio-ecological spaces, in which the conservation of pollinator diversity in cities can be directly promoted through conservation gardening. However, there is a lack of insights into how practical knowledge of gardeners can be combined with scientific findings in order to develop evidence-based and practice-oriented guidelines for insect conservation interventions. In a co-creation process, we facilitated three workshops with community gardeners from Berlin and discussed research methods and results from four years of ecological research on the relationships between pollinators and garden features. Subsequently, we performed a qualitative content analysis to identify critical adoption barriers and learn from previous experiences of the gardeners. Our preliminary results revealed the gardeners’ great interest in understanding the scientific process as well as their high motivation to integrate new information in their own knowledge. Therefore, we think that co-creation has high potential for initiating change as it includes relevant stakeholders at an early stage of the transformation process.