When scientists fail to get their message across to a wider public, or to policy makers, it's often because they’re speaking an obscure language, laden with jargon only they understand. However, one of the things that impressed me about the Monday panel discussion was that everyone spoke in plain English. If someone had walked in from the street, they'd have had no trouble understanding what was being said. I can't recall a single mention, for example, of the word ‘stakeholder’. One of the panelists described agroforestry as "a multi-disciplinary, people-centred approach to land use," which doesn't exactly trip off the tongue, but at least it would be intelligible to non-scientists and outsiders.
It was good to see so many different interests represented on the panel, with a senior UN bureaucrat - the Director of Forestry at FAO - sitting alongside a Kenyan goat farmer and a spokesman for the indigenous people in Indonesia. This gave the whole discussion a thoroughly democratic air.