Analysis of the stakeholders' perception of shellfish diseases

One of VIVALDI's objective was to evaluate the perceptions of stakeholders about disease risks and reasons why they implement, or not, key management strategies, and the multiple ways they are practiced. The overarching aim was to identify the facilitators and barriers to implementation of disease mitigation/control measures at a country/EU level.

To this end, we sorted to unpack the varied perceptions of stakeholders with regard disease hazards and the ways they weigh the risks and benefits of different potential actions and of action versus inaction. This enabled exploration of the importance of different disease management measures for each group of stakeholders, based on the factors they deem to be important (e.g. economics, acceptability, perceived benefit, understanding); ranking these management measures also assisted comparison between the groups. Throughout these studies, we sorted to compare perceptions between stakeholders involved in production of shellfish species, different stakeholder categories, and across VIVALDI partners’ countries.

A key novel perspective developed in this task 6.2 highlights the critical importance of variation in beliefs and priorities across location, mollusc species, and stakeholder categories. Part of this variation may be explained by the differences in the priorities of different stakeholder groups, and the stakeholder networks within and between participating countries, as shown in task 6.1 (see Deliverable D6.6). These results strongly suggest that these differences should to be taken into account for prevention measures/strategies to be successfully and sustainably implemented at the EU level but also at the national level.

A report was produced summarising the results mentionned above. You may find it on this page (English version only)

This exercise was pushed a little further in France, using linguistic and actor-network theory analyses. The main conclusions and results of this analysis can be found here in English. The French version of the complete report is also available on this page.