A research agenda for knowledge exchange in environmental management and beyond

 Posted by sustainable on February 24, 2013 

Knowledge exchange (KE) is a broad term that includes concepts such as sharing, generation, co-production, co-management, and brokerage of knowledge. It can be defined as processes that generate, share and/or use knowledge through various methods appropriate to the context, purpose, and participants involved. Many such processes have been studied in various ways for centuries. Some fields of study, such as knowledge management (with work mostly from organisational management), have research journals dedicated to the study of KE. There is, however, increasing emphasis on finding effective ways of sharing knowledge, such as in environmental management, sustainability and public health, where there is recognition of the need to involve multiple stakeholders in the co-production and sharing of knowledge. In the UK, research councils now require impact plans in research proposals, with KE being conceptualised as key to the pathway of generating impact from research. Yet many questions remain about how KE works and how engagement, interaction and learning from KE can be improved. KE is also rapidly becoming a recognised research area in its own right either as a subsection of other fields of study (e.g. within environmental management), or as a cross-disciplinary subject that transcends and applies to many other more established fields.

In recognition of these trends recent research has developed a research agenda for improving understanding of KE for environmental management and other fields of study. This research elicited the expertise of 20 academics involved in research and practice of KE from different disciplines and backgrounds (e.g. education, international development, environmental management). Many of these had extensive experience in the practice of KE and some had primary roles as KE professionals.

There was general consensus among the experts about many aspects of KE, including:

• That KE is generally a process of individual or social learning within or between groups of individuals;
• The process of KE can be unidirectional, but to be more effective, KE needs to be seen to be a multidirectional process that involves the co-production of knowledge;
• Viewing knowledge as something that can be passed around in inert form through traditional processes of ‘transfer’ is outmoded and does not reflect what is known about how knowledge is constructed and shared;
• Viewing knowledge as fixed or inert, no matter who exchanges it, how it is exchanged, or in whichever context is problematic. Such a view does not  reflect relatively common and accepted understandings of researchers on knowledge about how it is constructed and shared;
• KE is very significantly influenced by a range of contextual factors including political and social considerations, power relationships, the status of individuals, and what the process aims to achieve;
• Outcomes of KE can be wide ranging, from the generation of information that can be shared, individual learning, enhanced cohesion and trust, empowerment, participation, ownership and responsibility for decision-making, and flattening of hierarchies between individuals and groups;
• Outcomes depend on a range of individual factors, such as how people internalize knowledge, the skills of facilitators of KE, and past experience, expertise and background; and
• Outcomes depend greatly on how KE is defined, how goals are identified, and projects implemented.

The experts reviewed a number of key themes from defining and conceptualizing KE, to evaluating KE, and from the efficiency and effectiveness of KE to the role of power in influencing KE and its relevance to participation and the coproduction of knowledge. A diverse range of 80 research questions were also identified, such as:

• How are definitions of KE influenced by, and related to, definitions of knowledge and processes of knowledge generation, co-generation, storage, transfer and management?
• What indicates success in a KE process?
• What criteria should be used to evaluate the success of KE processes in different contexts and over different time-horizons?
• What incentives and conditions need to be in place for different groups of people to want to engage and remain in a KE process?
• How do different motivations of individuals influence KE (e.g. ‘altruism’ versus ‘what’s in it for me?’)?
• By what ‘processes’ do individuals become ‘more expert’ in KE settings?
• Whose knowledge counts most in a given KE process, and why does this occur?
• What role do new technologies play in KE?

Such questions and the review of the themes have highlighted five key issues. First, there is a wide breadth of questions relating to KE requiring attention. Second, much greater attention is needed on improving understanding of the process of KE. Third, particular emphasis is required on how KE should or could be evaluated. This is not only because evaluation of KE projects and programmes is currently lacking but also because developing effective evaluation methodologies and implementing them is key to addressing many of the other research questions. Fourth, many of the research questions cannot easily be addressed without addressing others. For example, to address questions about evaluating KE, some of the questions about identifying objectives and how KE is conceptualised also need to be considered. This highlights the need for those setting research agendas to simultaneously encourage in-depth and robust investigations of KE in ways that also ensure work is integrated across research themes.

Overall, the research has raised awareness of KE as an interdisciplinary applied field involving a multitude of topics that requires input from researchers, practitioners and beneficiaries and consideration of diverse epistemological and ontological perspectives and needs. Addressing research gaps will not be a linear process, and research and practice in KE need to develop alongside one another in an iterative manner. Incentives are therefore required to help facilitate research that establishes and uses appropriate action research methodologies; that makes best use of the learning opportunities provided by existing KE projects; and embeds evaluation as a normal part of KE research and practice. By doing so an adaptive learning approach where continual learning about KE will be encouraged.

For full details of this research see the article online:

Fazey, I., A. C. Evely, M. R. Reed, L. C. Stringer, J. H. J. Kruijsen, P. C. L. White, A. Newsham, L. Jin, M. Cortazzi, J. Phillipson, K. L. Blackstock, N. Entwistle, W. R. Sheate, F. Armstrong, C. Blackmore, J. A. Fazey, J. Ingram, J. Gregson, P. Lowe, S. Morton, and C. Trevitt. In Press. Knowledge Exchange: A review and research agenda for environmental management. Environmental Conservation.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S037689291200029X

Grey, green or blue economy? It’s sustainability, stupid!

 Posted by sustainable on March 7, 2013

It is clear that the present financial crisis has more or less laid to rest the old modes of economic thinking. The crisis has put paid to the grey economy, based on the theories of Milton Friedman and others, who believe strongly in the efficiency of the private sector and the market mechanism. The present situation does have a positive aspect, however, which is that science, with politics in its wake, is forcing us to think about different ways to look at our economy and society in general.

One solution that is often referred to is a transition to a green economy. The core of a new, green economy involves the clean, safe production of goods, materials and energy. A green economy is circular, which means that waste forms the raw material for new products. A green economy is ‘bio-based’, which means we no longer use oil but green raw materials derived from plants and waste. While it is certainly a step in the right direction, a green economy is in fact an illusion. If we produce more efficiently while simultaneously producing twice as much, still under the influence of the growth dogma, then the final result will always be less sustainable than before. But the green economy also has other serious shortcomings: we ask consumers to pay more, generally for poorer quality, and we ask financiers to invest more for lower yields. Moreover, much of the capital invested in sustainable shares by people with Euro or Dollar signs in their eyes has (also) simply evaporated.

So what about a blue economy, as suggested by Gunter Pauli? Pauli developed the idea of a blue economy starting in the late 1990s. Inspired by ecosystems, the blue economy involves the cyclical production (there we go again) of food, income and jobs from ‘waste’. In other words, there is a similarity to ‘cradle-2-cradle’ thinking.

The key idea underlying both the green and the blue economy is that sustainability problems can be solved with innovative, technological improvements, without us having to modify our lifestyle. Solutions are principally sought in technology, rather than, for example, in the social or cultural arena, while there is still a clear association with growth, earning money and a continuation of our consumptive behaviour. Furthermore, the consequences of green or blue economic systems for transport (stripping down and re-using products leads to more traffic) and energy consumption (recycling takes a lot of energy) commonly remain under-illuminated.

In other words, it is by no means certain that a green or a blue economy will lead to sustainable outcomes. We still have no idea how waste streams can be directed so that they arrive in precisely the right quantity, at the precise moment and at precisely the right location to serve as ‘food’ for other processes, with only a marginal demand for transport and energy. The same goes for the question of how the seemingly inherent growth of the technosphere can be limited.

It is clear that economic thinking of any colour just doesn’t work. We have to rid ourselves of the notion that ‘profit’ automatically means ‘more money’, and that ‘growth’ can only be ‘economic’. We have to realise that we have to place people and the environment above profit and capital. It would be better to replace our entire body of economic thought by a philosophy that dares to take a hard look at the complexity of our current social and environmental issues. That means sustainable development, without the ‘P’ of profit.

Resilience thinking: A concept of or for our time?

Posted by sustainable on March 23, 2013 

 The term ‘resilience’ is increasingly being used in a wide range of circles from ecology, economics, emergency and disaster management, community development, education, psychology, and engineering. It often refers to the capacity of a ‘system’ of some kind (e.g. community, forest, organisation, person) to absorb and adapt to some form of change (hurricanes, economic shocks, trauma) in a way that enables the system to retain the same functions and outputs (jobs, wellbeing, provision of food from a forest etc.). Resilience thinking comes from a systems thinking world view, which recognises that systems are dynamically complex, where changing one aspect in a system can have major and unpredictable impacts on other aspects, such as the collapse of global economies and the credit crunch.

Use of the term ‘resilience’ has been increasing. Google trends shows a steady increase in the number of searches using the term ‘resilience’ relative to the total number of searches over time, while almost seven times as many research papers used the term in 2011 than in 2000. This raises an interesting question: Is increasing use of ‘resilience’ simply a reflection of a broader change towards more systemic thinking in society, or can teaching resilience/systems thinking actually facilitate a change in the way problems are perceived and addressed? That is, is resilience a concept of our time, or a concept that can be used for our time?

To answer this question, it is useful to consider studies of personal epistemological beliefs (PEBs). These are the beliefs held by people about what they consider knowledge to be and how they come to know something, such as the extent to which they see the world as simple or complex, certain or uncertain, and whether they justify what they know through some form of evidence and analysis or by what ‘feels right’. These beliefs have profound impacts on the rest of thinking and behaviour. For example, most conflicts are due to some form of contestation over how knowledge is justified (e.g. what counts as evidence). Those who see the world as complex and unpredictable are also more likely to dig deeper into a problem to look for counterintuitive findings, and recognise there may be different perspectives on the problem and its solutions, than those who view the world as simple and certain. Students with more pluralistic thinking therefore tend to do better in academic tests than those with more black and white kinds of thinking.

Teaching resilience thinking certainly has potential to influence these higher order epistemic beliefs. However, the effect of teaching resilience thinking will also depend on how it is taught (e.g. whether students are required to actively think about their thinking) and on where a student is starting from (if a student has already developed more pluralistic or systemic thinking then they are less likely to be affected). This then raises another important question: Is resilience thinking just a stepping stone to other, possibly more sophisticated ways of thinking that also have profound impacts on how we relate to others and the world we live in?

Research on thinking, such as that by Susanne Cook-Greuter, suggests that most people in western societies view the world as traditional, conventional stages (like the more black and white thinking described above), but that there are also many stages of development that go beyond this. ‘Systems thinking’, however, occurs at the beginning of the postconventional stage. This helps explain why resilience thinking is so popular in our current time: it provides a safe bridge for people to make this significant leap from one way of thinking to another, and to enable them to start seeing the world differently. But resilience and systems thinking is only one step on a road to other cognitive developments. Think, for example, of the seriously wise people like the Dalai Lama who have spent many years (and lives?) in deep exploration of the mind and body. Their kind of thinking is rare, and resilience/systems thinking is only part of a process towards more sophisticated ways of viewing the world and how a person relates to it.

So back to the question: Is resilience thinking a product of our changing times, or can it be used for our time? Certainly resilience thinking can help some people develop new ways of thinking, and is therefore an important conceptual tool to instigate a new approach to understanding and approaching the world’s problems. It is also particularly important in current western contexts where shifts to more systemic ways of thinking are happening. However, resilience thinking is only one of many perspectives. In addition to facilitating cognitive developments using lenses such as resilience thinking, it is therefore important to continue to strive towards other more sophisticated and pluralistic ways of understanding and addressing real world challenges.

This article is a reproduction of a contribution to the ‘Geographer’: a publication of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society which featured a range of articles on resilience in Autumn 2012 (http://www.rsgs.org/publications/geographer.shtml) The work is also based on a research paper (available open access):  Fazey, I., 2010. Resilience and Higher Order Thinking. Ecology and Society, 15(3): 22.

Filling gaps in science with creativity: an interview with artist Anna Keleher

 Posted by sustainable on March 29, 2013

Some time ago, we asked how the creative arts might bring a new dimension to your research: might it actually be possible to integrate creative practitioners into interdisciplinary teams to generate new insights about the world around us? We asked this question to Anna Keleher, an artist with an MA in Arts and Ecology, who is currently fundraising for her latest project Radio Dreaming (with Claire Cote), which explores dreams of place and how landscapes speak through dreamers.

In this interview, Anna suggests how the creative arts may operate within an interdisciplinary context, to help derive new insights. The interview suggest that there are (at least) four ways you can work more effectively with the creative arts:

1. Integrate artistic practice into your methodology as you would the methods of any other discipline. The practices of many artists are remarkably similar to researchers in many disciplines, methodically experimenting with new materials to infer new insights about the natural world (as Anna does with soft rushes to infer insights about the role of cordage and material cultural of Neanderthals)
2. Create informal spaces for the creative arts to act as a catalyst to stimulate new ways of thinking about the world around us (in Anna’s case by posing a simple but radical question)
3. Enable the creative arts to perform a mediation role between disciplines, initiating conversations between disciplines that might never normally interact together, using art as the medium through which conversations can occur without the barriers of discipline-specific jargon
4. To get these sorts of benefits from collaborating with the creative arts, it is essential to collaborate with creative practitioners as equals – for an interdisciplinary team to function effectively, no team member can perceive themselves to be any better than anyone else, no matter how many letters they’ve got after their name or how many titles they’ve got in front of their name. Artists need to be integrated into interdisciplinary teams as equals, who like everyone else in the team have unique expertise, experience and insights to bring to the research

Over to you Anna!

“As a contemporary artist, with an Arts and Ecology training, I mediate between worlds, interpreting and revealing “hidden” or “hard to see” things. I use ancient and contemporary technologies to reach and share insights. But like other wild things, insights are timid, so my approach must be indirect. I feign disinterest, I experiment, play, record, collect, disguise, collaborate with people, places and/or things. I have found thatcollaboration acts as a kind of lure, encouraging a whole wildlife of novel ideas and approaches with which to help shape the future.”

“Meeting with New Mexican artist/anthropologist, Claire Coté and adventuring into Geopark and National Parks alone, I understood that an important part of my practice is to meet with experts in the field. Like bats, rocks, fungi and dreams, experts are part of the natural biodiversity of a place, and can help me deepen my understandings. I might meet them by invitation or quite by chance in a cave, on a mountain or in a car park. Many of these encounters have had the status of true exchanges.”

“During my experimental research project “Talking With Things”, English Riviera Geopark Co-ordinator Mel Border, invited me to visit “Lynx Cave”, situated under Paignton Zoo. The Devonian Limestones of the Geopark are honeycombed with cracks, crevices and caverns some of which have been home to all kinds of creatures from hyenas and Steppe Pika to hominids. Mel was accompanied by a multi-discipliinary team led by Dr Danielle Schreve, a vertebrate paleontologist and specialist in Ice Age environments, fossil mammals and the early human colonisation of Europe. Danielle’s research into quaternary mammals both simulates and recreates present day ecologies.”

“I try to reconstruct prehistoric ecologies in my own imagination and had been wondering what mammals the robin might have followed long before the appearance of the gardener. Danielle told me about her research into the role of mammals in prehistoric ecosystems and about how Konic horses can increase biodiversity in the polder; as the horses’ hooves churn the boggy marshlands, bitterns come in to feed and the ecosystem becomes more complex and diverse. I thought I’d gone to heaven when the three of us ended up at the Zoo gates chatting about Neanderthal culture and creativity!”

“Dr Chris Proctor’s scientific data on the stratigraphy of flow-stones atKent’s Cavern shows that the hand axes trapped underground date them at 400,000 years old; therefore, the axes must have been made by Neanderthals. While Neanderthal hand axes are perfectly preserved beneath these giant stalagmites, there are no organic artifacts that have survived into the archaeological record to give us more information about ancient lives and cultures; no clothes, nets, traps, baskets, tethers, hammocks. Danielle emphatically dismissed the possibility of Neanderthal textiles. She said they didn’t wear clothes, so I persisted and explained my own experimental research and then posed a question.”

“Whether through the play of modern human or Neanderthal fingers, the string potential of long leafy plants means string is bound to happen again and again. My experiments in the natural world tell me that cordage is one of the cornerstones of our culture and is older than us by far.”

“I explained that as my project had unfolded, I had been using myself as a lab, experimenting to discover more about potential prehistoric cultures using iris leaves, rushes, horsehair and my own hands and feet. Though Neanderthals had slightly different brains from us, they would have been totally in tune with their environment as a matter of survival.  The lower parts of soft rushes are a known famine food and I’m in no doubt that Neanderthals would have eaten them. When you chew the soft rush, the flesh comes off, revealing a core of fibres that already looks like twine; when the fingers play, cordage is formed.”

“Giving evidence from my own practice I was able shift this paleontologist’s stuck vision of Neanderthal people’s creative capacity and their possibilities for material culture by posing a simple question. “What were Neanderthals doing all day if they had fingers and they had fibrous leafy plants, but they hadn’t discovered string?”.   A light bulb went on for her at that point!”

“Art thrives in the gaps between scientific evidence and I saw a niche opening for myself as a creative thinker/experimental researcher, like the bittern that enriches new ecosystems.”

Anna Keleher has a distinction in M.A Arts and Ecology from UCF incorporating Dartington college of Arts. Donate to her Kickstarter campaign here: Radio Dreaming Kickstarter Campaign

Mapping Dreams at Killykeagan

Find out more about Anna’s work:

• http://www.axisweb.org/artist/annakeleher
• www.dreamingplace.eu
• http://creativetorbay.com/anna-keleher/
• www.claireandanna.com

What motivates people to cut their carbon footprint? It’s much more than “the environment”

Posted by sustainable on July 3, 2013 

 People who cut their carbon footprint because they’re worried about climate change are ‘environmental’ types, right? They love ‘nature’ and get fired up by those photos of polar bears stranded on melting ice. They might even rate ‘protecting the environment’ or ‘respecting the earth’ as their number one value.

Well, no; not necessarily.

It’s not (just) “the environment, stupid!”

As part of a research project on promoting lower-carbon lifestyles, I interviewed people who have cut their carbon footprint because they’re worried about climate change, to try and understand more about what motivates them. Concern about ‘the environment’ for its own sake is not generally their main reason for action. They tend to be more bothered about the effects of climate change on poorer people in developing countries. They’re often motivated by a deep sense of the injustice of a situation where those who will suffer most are those who have contributed least to the problem, and they talked in terms of trying to live with a fairer – therefore smaller – share of the world’s resources. When I asked them to imagine that we live in a different kind of world, one in which climate change would threaten polar bears with extinction but would somehow have little effect on humans, several interviewees said they would probably not be so anxious about the issue, and would not be trying so hard to address it.

Moreover, their stories about how they’d got engaged in climate change action were about human rights groups and issues as often as environmental ones. Sally said that because she believed that all the gains she’d worked for in terms of women’s rights in developing countries were threatened, “it was probably actually feminism which brought me into climate change.” Deepta explained that many of her friends in her university Amnesty International group were also involved in environmental campaigns so she joined in with them too. David talked about growing up in South Africa, where “you really had to have a view about what you thought of race discrimination and so on.” This led to political and social awareness that developed into concerns about many issues, including climate change.

It seemed to me that these were people who cared about the environment but who cared even more about people and social justice. To check this, I asked interviewees to answer a short questionnaire testing the strength of ‘biospheric’ (environment-centred), ‘altruistic’ (people-centred), and ‘egoistic’ (self-centred) values as guiding principles for their lives. The top-rated value was ‘social justice’, with ‘equality’ second. ‘Protecting the environment’ came third, and ‘respecting the earth’ was only sixth (after being ‘helpful’ and ‘a world at peace’). The majority of interviewees scored higher on the altruistic values scale than the biospheric one. Not surprisingly, they scored egoistic values low.

I also asked interviewees “what images come to mind with the phrase ‘a low-carbon lifestyle’?” Although many gave a list of things to do (or to do without), some offered quite different ideas:

“For me it’s more local living, stronger communities, more time for each other [. . .] a less materialistic lifestyle where we don’t need to have so much and hopefully meaning that we don’t need to work so much and have more free time.” (Paul)

“Somehow I see sunshine. Yeah, lightness actually. Brightness and a sort of small place to live. Green grass and everything bright. There’s something healthy about that. Healthy and wholesome I suppose.” (Aileen)

“Living really close to nature. I think that is the most dominant one. That’s the one that makes me happy and that’s the one that makes me inspired […] I think communities is another one. Connections with nature and community living” (Deepta)

These aren’t images that would translate into ‘carbon reductions per year’. They show that lower-carbon lifestyles are associated, at least for some people, with a much broader vision of ‘the good life’, and benefits such as health, happiness, and community. This also seemed to be true for some of the people who answered with the more typical list. For example, Claire thought fewer cars on the streets would be “lovely” because people would interact and not have to worry about traffic. Prue repeatedly stressed the satisfaction she gains from cycling (“it’s not only that you are not using resources, but you see a neighbour and you stop and say hello in a way you don’t when you use the car”) and buying local produce (“you are eating healthily, and you’re saving money”).

To me, perhaps the most remarkable finding was that some of these highly motivated people weren’t even that keen to talk about climate change. They thought the phrase was off-putting, or they were irritated by it because it’s overused, or they were simply not that interested in climate change. One person said she didn’t think you even have to believe in climate change to want to live a lower-carbon lifestyle, because of the benefits you’d gain from it.

These findings have important implications.

For example, appealing to altruistic values and to desires for things like quieter streets and stronger local communities may be more effective ways of encouraging people to change their behaviour than focussing on information about climate change impacts on the natural world.

People who want to promote lower-carbon lifestyles might find it worth working with human rights and development groups, and with organisations that place emphasis on altruistic values, like many religious groups. Development charities such as Oxfam and Christian Aid are already campaigning on climate change, but more could be done to make links between the concerns of organisations promoting women’s, children’s, and refugees’ rights and welfare and the potential impacts of climate change on these groups.

The wide-ranging positive visions of what ‘a low-carbon lifestyle’ means to people, and the fact that ‘climate change’ is not necessarily seen as interesting suggests that action campaigns should promote a much broader, more holistic view of a lower-carbon future, not just a ‘to do’ list to ‘combat climate change’. People do need information and advice about what action they can take, but “Ten Tips to Save the Planet” type messages may not be the best way of framing it – or not for everyone.

Obviously, these interviewees are not typical of the general population, but if “It’s the environment, stupid!” is not a catchphrase that really captures the range of motivations of even these committed people, the approach it represents is probably even less likely to inspire widespread behaviour change among the general public. Climate change is a complex problem with social, economic, political and ecological dimensions. This research suggests that it shouldn’t be framed merely as an ‘environmental’ issue by those who hope to engage the public in dealing with it.

Rachel Howell is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Human Dimensions of Climate Change funded by the Climate Change Consortium of Wales (C3W). She has just completed a PhD on ‘Promoting Lower-Carbon Lifestyles’ (you can download an accessible, 3-page summary of her thesis here). She is interested in behavioural change rather than just increased awareness or concern.

Note: all names used in this post have been changed.

Sustainability: science or fiction?

Posted by sustainable on January 30, 2012 

What is sustainable development?
The essence of sustainable development is simply this: to provide for the fundamental needs of mankind without doing violence to the natural system of life on earth. This idea arose in the early eighties of the last century and came out of a scientific look at the relationship between nature and society. The concept of sustainable development reflected the struggle of the world population for peace, freedom, better living conditions and a healthy environment [1]. During the latter half of the 20th century, these four goals recurred regularly as world-wide, basic ideals.

With the end of the Second World War in 1945, it was widely believed that the first goal of peace had actually been achieved. But then came the arms race and, although a kind of global peace was maintained, the Cold War led to a range of conflicts fought out at the local level. When one looks today at many parts of the world – the Middle East, Middle Africa, for example – it is all too evident that peace is still a long way off.

Under the banner of freedom, people fought for the extension of human rights and for national independence. Today, the poorest two thirds of the world population sees ‘development’ as the most important goal, by means of which they hope to achieve the same material well-being as the wealthy one third.

But this ideal, upon which so much emphasis has been laid recently, has to reckon with the earth itself. This reckoning began with concern over the exhaustion of our natural resources and only later did it dawn on us that a disturbance of the complex systems upon which our lives depend can have enormous consequences.

The last twenty five years have been characterized by an attempt to link together the four ideals cited above – peace, freedom, improved living conditions and a healthy environment [1], an ambition which stems from the realization that striving for one of these ideals often means that the others must necessarily also be striven for. This struggle for ‘sustainable development’ is one of the great challenges for today’s society.

Sustainable development is a complex idea that can neither be unequivocally described nor simply applied. There are scores of different definitions, but we shall restrict ourselves to the most frequently quoted, that of the Brundtland Committee (1987) [2]:

“Sustainable development is development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

If we look at the lowest common denominator of the different definitions and interpretations of sustainable development, we note four common characteristics [3]. The first indicates that sustainable development is anintergenerational phenomenon: It is a process of transference from one to another generation. So, if we wish to say anything meaningful about sustainable development, we have to take into account a time-span of at least two generations. The time period appropriate to sustainable development is thus around 25 to 50 years.

The second common characteristic is the level of scale. Sustainable development is a process played out on several levels, ranging from the global to the regional and the local. What may be seen as sustainable at the national level, however, is not necessarily sustainable at an international level. This is due to shunting mechanisms, as a result of which negative consequences for a particular country or region are moved on to other countries or regions.

The third common characteristic is that of multiple domains. Sustainable development consists of at least three: the economic, the ecological and the socio-cultural domains. Although sustainable development can be defined in terms of each of these domains alone, the significance of the concept lies precisely in the interrelation between them.
The aim of sustainable social development is to influence the development of people and societies in such a way that justice, living conditions and health play an important role. In sustainable ecological development the growth of natural systems is the main focus of concern and the maintenance of our natural resources is of primary importance.

What is at issue here are three different aspects of sustainable development which in theory need not conflict but which in practice often conflict. The underlying principles are also essentially different: with sustainable economic development the concept of efficiency has a primary role, whereas with sustainable social development the same may be said of the concept of justice and with sustainable ecological development it is the concepts of resilience or capacity for recovery that are basic.

The fourth common characteristic concerns the multiple interpretation of sustainable development. Each definition demands a projection of current and future social needs and how these can be provided for. But no such estimation can be really objective and, furthermore, any such estimation is inevitably surrounded by uncertainties. As a consequence, the idea of sustainable development can be interpreted and applied from a variety of perspectives.

As will be apparent from the above, a concept like sustainable development is difficult to pin down. Because it is by its nature complex, normative, subjective and ambiguous, it has been criticized both from a social and from a scientific point of view. One way of escaping from the ‘sustainability dilemma’ is to begin from the opposite position: that of non-sustainable development. Non-sustainable or unsustainable development is only too visible in a number of intractable problems entrenched in our social systems and which cannot be solved through current policies. These intractable problems are characterized by the involvement of multiple interests as well as their great complexity, lack of structure, structural uncertainty and apparent uncontrollability.

Such problems can be recognized in many national and global economic sectors. One sees them in agriculture, for example, with its many facets of unsustainability becoming manifest in the form of protein-related diseases such as BSE (mad cow disease), and in foot-and-mouth disease. The water sector has to deal with such symptoms as flooding, droughts and problems related to water quality, while the energy sector produces energy in a one-sided manner and – as a direct result – affects the environment. One sees the same symptoms in traffic and transport systems, where atmospheric pollution and traffic queues can be seen as symptoms of unsustainability; and as far as our health is concerned, the spread of SARS, the global increase in the incidence of malaria, malnutrition and its counterpart – the increase in obesity – are all far from sustainable.

These unsustainable developments reflect systemic faults embedded in our society. In contrast to market faults, systemic faults derive from deep-seated lacks or imbalances in society. They cannot be corrected through the ‘market’ and form a serious impediment to the optimal functioning of our social system. Systemic faults operate at various levels and can be of an economic, social or institutional nature. If such intractable problems are a sign of an unsustainable development, they can only be solved through fundamental changes in our society. Only thus can non-sustainable conditions be transformed and put on a more sustainable basis.

Sustainability science: a new paradigm

It is clear that in making the concept of sustainable development concrete, one has to take into account a number of practical elements and obstacles. Thus there is little doubt that integrated approaches are needed to support sustainable development. Questions as to exactly how such integration – underpinned by the right research – should be conceived and put into effect have so far been the preserve of a select group.

On a global scale, great progress has been achieved, within the framework of the international ‘Global Change’ research programme, in the integration of previously separated disciplines. Fifteen years ago, atmospheric chemists and biologists were not sharing the knowledge emerging from their studies of atmospheric change – despite the fact that biological processes are such an important factor in regulating the composition of the atmosphere. Nor was either discipline well integrated with atmospheric physics, oceanography or climatology. Today these disciplines are much more closely linked and together, on the basis of integrated research and risk analysis, they form the core of our knowledge about global climate change.

The international research community concerned with global change has thus made huge progress in coupling the various relevant natural sciences. Unfortunately, however, despite great national and international commitment, there has been far less progress in understanding the interactions between mankind and environment.

In order to realize the high level of expectations, a new research paradigm is needed that is better able to reflect the complexity and the multidimensional character of sustainable development. The new paradigm must be able to encompass different magnitudes of scales (of time, space and function), multiple balances (dynamics), multiple actors (interests) and multiple failures (systemic faults).

This new paradigm emerges from a scientific sub-current that characterizes the evolution of science in general – a shift from mode-1 to mode-2 science (see Table 1) [4]. Mode-1 science is completely academic in nature, monodisciplinary and the scientists themselves are mainly responsible for their own scientific performance. In mode-2 science, which is at core both inter- and intra-disciplinary, the scientists form a part of a heterogeneous network. Their scientific tasks are part of an extensive process of knowledge production and they are also responsible for more than merely scientific production.

Another paradigm that is gaining increasing influence is what is known as post-normal science. It is impossible to eradicate uncertainty from decision-making processes, and therefore it must be adequately managed through organized participatory processes in which different kinds of knowledge – not only scientific knowledge – come into play. As a result, those making policy are as well informed as possible about complex social problems of major importance.

The research programme that is beginning to emerge from this movement is known as Sustainability Science[5]. The virtual Forum on Science and Technology for Sustainability is at the moment one of the motors behind this programme [6]. Sustainability science, however, is not an independent profession, let alone a discipline. It is rather a vital area in which science, practice and visions of North and South meet one another, with contributions from the whole spectrum of the natural sciences, economics and social sciences. Sustainability is characterized by a number of shared research principles. ‘Shared’ here implies a broad recognition by a growing group of people who – in a steadily extending network – are active in the area of sustainability science. The central elements of sustainability science are:

•    inter- and intra-disciplinary research
•    co-production of knowledge
•    co-evolution of a complex system and its environment
•    learning through doing and doing through learning
•    system innovation instead of system optimalization

Simply stated, this new model can be represented as co-evolution, co-production and co-learning. The theory of complex systems can be employed as an umbrella mechanism to bring together the various different parts of the sustainability puzzle.

Integrated analysis of sustainability

This new paradigm has far-reaching consequences for the methods and techniques that need to be developed before an integrated analysis of sustainability can be carried out. These new methods and techniques can also be characterized as follows:
• from supply- to demand-driven
• from technocratic to participant
• from objective to subjective
• from predictive to exploratory
• from certain to uncertain

In short, previous current and future generations will be seen more as heuristic instruments, as aids in the acquisition of better insight into complex problems of sustainability. At each stage in the research of sustainability science, new methods and techniques will need to be used, extended or invented. The methodologies that are used and developed in the integrated assessment community are highly suitable for this purpose.

Roughly, there are a number of different kinds of methods for the integrated assessment of sustainability: analytic methods, participative methods and more managerial methods. Analytic methods mainly look at the nature of sustainable development, employing among other approaches the theory of complexity. In participative research approaches, non-scientists such as policy-makers, representatives from the business world, social organizations and citizens also play an active role. The more managerial methods are used to investigate the policy aspects and the controllability of sustainable transitions.

An example of an analytic instrument for the assessment of sustainability is the integrated assessment model which allows one to describe and explain changes between periods of dynamic balance. This model consists of a system-dynamic representation of the driving forces, system changes, consequences, feed-backs, potential lock-ins and lock-outs of a particular development in a specific area. Another analytic instrument is the scenario that describes sustainable and unsustainable developments, including unexpected events, changes and lines of fracture.

Participatory methods differ according to the aim of the study and its participants. Thus negotiation processes are mimicked in so-called policy exercises, whether or not these are supported by simulations. In the method of mutual learning, the analysis is enriched by the integration of the knowledge possessed by participants from diverse areas of expertise.

An example of a new kind of policy instrument is provided by transition management [7]. Transition management is a visionary, evolutionary learning process that is progressively constructed by the undertaking following steps:
(i)    develop a long-term vision of sustainable development and a common agenda (macro-scale)
(ii)    formulate and execute a local experiment in renewal that could perhaps contribute to the transition to sustainability (micro-scale)
(iii)    evaluate and learn from these experiments
(iv)    put together the vision and the strategy for sustainability, based on what has been learned (this boils down to a cyclical search and learn process that one might call evolutionary steering: a new kind of planning with understanding, based on learning by doing and doing through learning).

But now that the first steps towards an integrated sustainability science have been taken, there is a prospect of making some major leaps forward.

Towards a strategy for sustainable development

Breaking down the barriers

A research framework for sustainability science will need to be further built on existing sciences and scientific programmes. I have also shown that the principal opportunities and policies for transitions to sustainability are multiple, cumulative and interactive. We need more, however, before we can study the sustainability of the interaction between the planet and its ecosystems and peoples.

It should be clear that sustainability science will have to be above all an integrative science, a science which sets out to break down the barriers that divide the traditional sciences. It will have to promote the integration between such different scientific disciplines as economics, earth sciences, biology, social sciences and technology.
The same can be said for sectoral approaches, in which such closely linked aspects of human activity as energy, agriculture, health and transport are still dealt with as separate subjects.

The most significant threats to sustainability appear in certain regions, with their specific social and ecological characteristics. In fact, a sustainable transition will often have to occur within the local surroundings. However, sustainability science has to promote integration on a larger geographical scale in order to get beyond the sometimes easy but finally artificial division between global and local perspectives. Regardless of what spatial scale is found most suitable for the investigation of any particular sustainability issues, gaining insight into the linkages between events on both the macro and the micro scale is one of the major challenges facing sustainability science.

Finally, sustainability science must ensure the integration of different styles of knowledge creation in order to bridge the gulf between science, practice and politics.

Sustainable policy

If we look at the consequences of this new vision of sustainability for policy, we can note the following. It is important for policy-makers – both in politics and in the business community – that specific policy aims along with their associated time limits are clearly determined. Several possibilities are shown in the diagram below (Figure 1). One of the options the policy-maker has – and this is not so far from the current situation – is to go for short-term goals and simple or cheap means of achieving them. In contrast to such an approach, a more pro-active, innovative standpoint can be adopted that pursues longer-term goals, taking into account developments on different levels of scale and in different sectors. Unquestionably, sustainable development demands the latter approach.

To facilitate decision-making, sustainability scientists must assist in the task of making concrete both problems and solutions on all relevant temporal and spatial scales. This means that sustainability at the systemic level must be assessed, bringing to bear the following procedural elements: analysis of deeper-lying structures of the system, projection into the future and assessment of sustainable and unsustainable trends. Evaluation of the effects of sustainable policy and the design of possible solutions through sustainable strategies also belong here.

Fortunately, integrated approaches to sustainability issues in such areas as environment and development are not entirely new. For example, research has already been carried out into the interactions between urban, rural, industrial and natural ecosystems in order to gain more insight into policy implications for the management of water. The search for integrated theories that combine different disciplinary strengths is an excellent way of creating a better basis for decision-making on sustainability.

Sustainable education

It will hardly come as a surprise to hear that the development of a healthy, just and sustainable society demands a major shift in our thinking, our values and our actions.

Today’s students will be the business leaders, scientific researchers, politicians, artists and citizens of tomorrow. The extent to which they will be prepared to take decisions in favour of a sustainable future depends on the awareness, the knowledge, expertise and values they have acquired during their studies and in the subsequent years. For this reason, the concepts and themes of sustainability should be integrated into all levels of educational programming. Curricula must be revised so that sustainable development forms a guiding principle throughout the entire period of their studies – and afterwards too. With an increasingly widespread awareness of this need, the United Nations has now proclaimed the coming decade as the ‘Decade of Education for Sustainable Development’.

The basic qualities that future sustainability scientists will need are: analytical insight, problem-solving qualities and good skills in both verbal and written presentation. No less important is knowledge of the diversity of instruments provided by the various disciplines involved, ranging from mathematics to history, from health sciences to economics. The range of skills needed is so wide that it can only be acquired through interdisciplinary study.

Another essential quality is the capacity to break down the barriers referred to earlier between the various scientific disciplines involved, policy-makers and citizens. And, last but by no means least, there is a need to devote great attention to the philosophy and the ethics that underpin sustainability science. At the present moment, however, there is a manifest lack in sustainability science of both fundamental and applied ‘research capacity’. In addition, there is a need for a greater diversity of approaches. It is essential therefore that in the coming decades we should put everything into the effort to build up this extra capacity in both the northern and the southern hemisphere.

In conclusion

Richard Feynman, one of the greatest physicists of the last century, once remarked: “Whoever say that he understands quantum theory, in all probability does not”. The same is true of sustainable development. Whoever says he knows what ‘sustainability’ is, in all probability does not. In a certain sense, a sustainable world is a fiction.
Thus, the concept of sustainable development does not contemplate any statistical state of affairs or finite stocks, but rather emphasizes a positive evolution and positive lines of development. Sustainable development can in fact be described as ‘the capacity of a society to move itself, in a certain time period, between satisfactory, adaptable and viable conditions.’[8]

As I have tried to explain above, however, it is in fact possible to lay a scientific foundation under this concept of sustainable development. And further, this can be given a practical content, which can vary from sustainable health to the sustainable use of our oceans and rivers, from sustainable tourism to sustainable enterprise and sustainable regional development.

Those in other sections of society such as the business community must also be encouraged to take responsibility for a sustainable future. They must be mobilized in such a way that they will actively participate in giving shape to sustainable development. Such a broad social front will be a necessary condition for making the abstract term ‘sustainable development’ both concrete and tangible.

References

1.    National Research Council, Our common journey: a transition toward sustainability. 1999, Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.
2.    WCED, Our Common Future. 1987, Oxford,UK: Oxford University Press.
3.    Grosskurth, J. and J. Rotmans, The scene model: getting grip on sustainable development in policy making. Environment, development and sustainability,
2005. 7: p. 135-151.
4.    Gibbons, M., The new production of knowledge: the dynamics of science and
research in comtemporary science. 1994, London: Sage.
5.    Kates, R.W., et al., Sustainability science. Science, 2001. 292: p. 641-642.
6.    Forum on Science and Technology for Sustainability. Available from:

http://sust.harvard.edu.

7.    Rotmans, J., R. Kemp, and M.B.A. van Asselt, More evolution than revolution:
transition management in public policy. Foresight, 2001. 3(1): p. 15-31.
8.    Giampietro, M., Complexity and scales: the challenge for integrated assessment, in Scaling in integrated assessment, J. Rotmans and D.S. Rothman, Editors.
2003, Swets & Zeitlinger: Linne. p. 293-327.

Professor dr. Pim Martens – p.martens@maastrichtuniversity.nl

Professor of Global Dynamics & Sustainable Development
Maastricht University/Leuphana University/Stellenbosch University
www.pimmartens.info

Director ICIS
International Centre for Integrated assessment and Sustainable development
Maastricht University
www.icis.unimaas.nl

Making Trans-Disciplinarity Work

Posted by sustainable on February 6, 2012 

 Trans-disciplinarity is all the rage. And it needs to be. Society faces issues and concerns that do not fall neatly into specific disciplines as defined in academia or elsewhere. Bringing multiple perspectives and multiple skills to bear is therefore essential. The action is to be found not within individual disciplines but at their points of intersection.

Much though there is a will to move to trans-disciplinarity, the road to getting there can be surprisingly hard – and sometimes frustrating. In a recent paper by Kent Redford (Misreading the Conservation Landscape, Oryx, 45(3), 324–330) and subsequent responses Redford says: “Although said to be an aphorism, I have seen it myself: blue crabs are unable to escape from a basket because each time one gets a claw over the edge and is ready to climb out, another crab grabs it and pulls it down. I worry that social scientists, with the causes they find important, and conservationists, with the causes they find important, are holding each other down.”

This frustration with attempts at trans-disciplinarity is not a new phenomenon. Many have struggled to make trans-disciplinarity work in many settings including industry where getting individuals from research, engineering, production and marketing to work effectively together has been a decades long endeavour. In spite of the interest and goodwill, why can it be so difficult and what does it take to make it work?

People trained in individual disciplines are trained to think in a particular way, have particular world-views and become embedded in, and committed to, those world-views. Their specialist perspective can become deeply embedded as part of their core values. Current educational systems encourage this silo mentality from an early age and accentuate it in settings where career success depends on ever more detailed exploration of ever-narrower questions. Except for some individuals with a particular aptitude, it is impossible, and indeed unreasonable, to expect people suddenly to develop the ability to break out of the world-view they have spent their careers developing.

As many in industry have found out, the key to success – difficult though that success will remain to achieve – is to supplement the specialists whom we consistently train with specially trained generalists. Generalists are people who gain a broad understanding of many of the disciplines relevant to their work and are then specifically trained in higher-level integration at an overall system level. In the model of the industrial ‘General Manager’, generalists have the ability to synthesize multiple viewpoints and work with people trained in different specialties to make trade-offs and find ‘best-fit’ solutions. The conservation community has not yet started to create the infrastructure to attract, train and develop such people. We are still training conservation biologists, ecologists, economists, psychologists, anthropologists, etc, etc, – each of them now focused on a sub-sub-sub-specialty of their narrow specialty. In such an environment it can be difficult to make inter-disciplinarity work.

There is also little space available for trans-disciplinary work. For the last few years I have tried hard to work with skilled and experienced conservationists to address some of the broader, higher level issues that we all face. The responses have been consistent. Yes, these are important issues; and they should be addressed; and they span many disciplines; and we have no future without them; and I have many ideas and thoughts to contribute – but I’m really too busy with my field or research projects in my specialty to spend any time on them.

We can only successfully address issues related to our environment by bringing together many perspectives from many disciplines. To do this successfully requires two things. First we need to start a process for training generalists – individuals with the skills necessary to bring together multiple conservation disciplines as well as an ability to incorporate perspectives from outside the conservation community. Secondly we need to create the space, the culture and the conditions that encourage people to address higher level issues rather than tying people’s careers and success to an ever-deeper focus on ever-narrower project work. Without needing to re-invent the wheel, we can learn from the experience of others and get there more quickly.

Dr Joe Zammit-Lucia
Artist, Author, Independent Scholar. Intersectionist.
www.theintersectionist.com    
joezl@me.com

Evolving Permaculture Solutions—keep it simple.

Posted by sustainable on February 13, 2012

It’s great to see that permaculture is taking root in institutions of higher learning throughout the world. Groups like Sustainable Learning make up a growing wave of university interest and involvement in permaculture. As declining energy sources become more evident and food emergencies become more commonplace, governments will be looking to universities to find BIG solutions.  Along with the hope of BIG solutions comes BIGmoney. Permaculture may soon be looked upon as a potential big solution. So as we stand today on the threshold of increasing interest in permaculture, let us take a moment to discuss the potential pitfalls that come with the big money. You may think such warnings are a bit premature, but things can change quickly, and in the words of hockey star Wayne Gretzky – it’s always best to “play where the puck is going to be.” Specifically I’d like to communicate lessons I’ve learned from riding the most recent wave of societal hope in a BIG solution– the emergence and likely failure of the biofuels boom.

I’ve been working in the biofuels boom of academia for the past 12 years. I’ve seen the blossoming of biofuels research go from one researcher across the hall, to including professors from every department on campus through the availability of millions of research dollars. The heart of the biofuels boom was the hope in cellulosic biofuels; of making gasoline out of grass—or ‘grassoline’. We were going to make a new crop, a new industry, and a new fuel, and we approached this endeavor like an Apollo mission. Specialists in grasses, machines, microbes, transportation systems, and economics all divided into designing their own part of the cellulosic biofuel system. As all these well-meaning scientists were working hard to figure out their small part of the whole system, nobody had a handle on how all these parts would fit together into a functioning whole. The agronomists bred high yielding grasses, the agricultural engineers designed machines to compact grass into dense shipping units, and microbiologists created enzymes to turn grass to sugar. My contribution was to estimate where the grass would be grown and at what cost. By necessity, we took data from other scientists on things like costs, yields, and time of microbe development. Because no part of the system actually existed, we had to get by on rough data.  We all published papers and built careers. The media played it up, and politicians came around with great interest to talk about our endeavor in biofuels.  Everything looked good, but then the first year’s ‘grassoline’ mandate went unmet.  As research continued, the second year’s mandate went unmet. Now it looks like a third year’s mandate will not be met, and there’s an uneasy feeling in the air. Could it be that something has gone wrong?

I believe that the biofuels research community is discovering the hard way that when it actually comes to putting it all together, building an energy-agricultural-industrial system is not like building a rocket ship; you can’t just bolt, for example, a densifying technology between the grassy fields and the enzyme vats. Bolts might work well on rocket ships, but they don’t work well in energy-agricultural-industrial systems.  Additionally, because the whole point of our endeavor is to create more energy than is used, the process of integrating the parts is vital to the energetic bottom line. The research community may now be discovering that these unwieldy systems cannot be quickly assembled. Yet as we look at alternatives, we see that similar systems have evolved.  Our goal of creating a ‘grassoline’ production system may be more like evolving a forest than assembling a rocket ship. Ecologists now know that if we want to create, say, a Smokey Mountains ecosystem, it would not only require the bolting together of species we find in the woods or even a succession of non-extinct species, but likely a succession of species that have gone extinct through the millennia of the forest’s evolution. The creation of a forest, or a cellulosic ethanol system, may not be as simple as a assembling a model but rather more like a dialog; a back-and-forth of trying one thing, seeing how it does, and then reacting in the next step. But when we went bravely into the biofuels endeavor, we did not think of it in such an evolutionary manner. Now after 10 years of research, millions of dollars spent, plus the spent faith of policymakers, we have not delivered.

I tell this story as a warning to the rising number of academics involved with permaculture. Whether we call it permaculture, regenerative agriculture, agro-ecology, sustainability or some other name, I believe the day is quickly approaching where big money will turn its eyes upon us to deliver big solutions. I believe big solutions are very possible, but when that day comes, we should not repeat the same mistakes as in the biofuels boom. The problems we propose fixing are big, and our solutions will span systems. We should not simply go about doing what academics and specialists are known for—going into their perspective corners and investigating, experimenting, engineering, and inventing. That would be rocket science, not evolutionary systems science. If we are to be successful, we should realize that we cannot build the solutions. We must evolve the solutions through the analogy of the dialog.

Who is the partner we dialog with? Where do we look to see if real change is taking hold? Where do we get the cues for what needs to be done next? It must be with the farmers and with the households who are using permaculture to meet and beat their bottom line. Truly, if you want to be on the forefront of innovating permaculture systems, the best strategy is to take a permaculture class, buy 20 acres, free up some time, and then try to engineer a living. I’m very serious about the above statement—the forefront of permaculture, which is a design system that I believe has the highest potential of seeing us through the energy descent era, should be on the farm and in the households of people that are constrained by the bottom line.

So what is academia’s role in the dialog? Our highest role as academics in the permaculture endeavor should be to:

1. Get out there and discover what the best innovators are doing.
2. Take the best models in terms of monetary, productive, energetic, and ecological success and let others know about them.
3. Communicate appropriate policies to policymakers that will benefit the innovators.
4. Train as many people as possible on the basic principles of permaculture and let them loose.

Simple, really! We should allow the innovations to bubble up from the people who practice permaculture, and then communicate these grassroots solutions to others.  We should mostly limit our role to one of the communicator, thus assuring that we don’t become the experts. To be successful at evolving complex systems, we need to be clear that the experts are the practitioners, not the academics. If we approach our work with this humble belief at its heart, we can avoid constructing a new system but help in evolving a new system. As Bill Mollison, one of the founders of permaculture, elegantly stated, “Though the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple.”

Dr. Chad Hellwinckel
Research Assistant Professor
Agricultural Policy Analysis Center 
The University of Tennessee
chellwin@utk.edu

Educating for sustainability?

 Posted by sustainable on February 22, 2012 

There is no doubt that the world is facing a number of serious challenges now and in the near future. The world population keeps rising and we clearly see the climate changing. Natural resources will become scarce and the environment will suffer if we don’t act and meet these challenges.

There are many possible approaches to how these challenges should be met. In our opinion, proper education of future leaders will create the sustainable development needed. The PRME LEADERS+20 Competition is a global competition focusing on how to integrate sustainability in management-related education to meet society’s demand for a sustainable world and leaders.

It all started at Aarhus University, Denmark, where the upcoming Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development sparked the idea of sponsoring a contest for students and lecturers. A contest where participants have to co-create innovative ways of integrating sustainability issues into management-related courses and programmes. The PRME LEADERS+20 Competition evolved into a team effort between the United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) and Aarhus University.

Large international companies such as Maersk, Vale, China Minmetals Corporation, and Novozymes have showed great interest in the competition and are supporting organizations. The Commissioner of Climate Action in the European Commission, Connie Hedegaard, is also supportive and thinks it is a splendid initiative. We are proud that such large organizations and influential people are supporting the cause as it proves that sustainable development is an important issue to both individuals and organizations.

Why?

We believe that the leaders of the future can’t afford NOT to be sustainable. We believe in changing people’s mindset through education and that by making changes locally, we will be able to make changes globally. We believe that this bottom-up approach to integrating sustainability issues into management-related courses and programmes is the way to move forward towards a more sustainably managed society. We hope to start a movement of students and lecturers focusing on how we should educate future leaders to meet global challenges.

However, it takes hard work to create focus on these rising global challenges and the sustainability issues connected to these challenges. Most people are aware of the sustainability challenges ahead and the need for action, but as it is with many things, it is hard for people to relate to this, unless they feel affected by it. Luckily focus on sustainability and the need for action has risen within the last few years. Therefore, we hope for great success with our competition.

We see the PRME LEADERS+20 Competition as a way of making small changes, which hopefully will lead to big changes in the long run. Changes that are beneficial for all of us in the long run because they are made with a sustainable focus in mind.

Please follow the link to read more about the competition http://prme-leaders20.au.dk/

This entry is written by Nina Hejlskov, Community manager at the PRME LEADERS+20 Competition

How we learn: a 21st-century riddle

Posted by sustainable on March 5, 2012 

Riddle: What starts unobtrusively but is emergent and unpredictable, spreads rapidly across boundaries, and can have widespread consequences across the system?

You might be forgiven for thinking of a virus or infectious disease. Viral infections begin in a host cell, multiplying and spreading rapidly across distances in unforeseeable ways. A virus spreads through biological networks – with no respect for national or other boundaries – and its effects can be far-reaching and with sweeping consequences.

But the answer is not a virus, nor an infectious disease. The answer is social learning capability!

Social learning capability – or the ability to spread learning rapidly through horizontal networks, irrespective of boundaries or silos – can revolutionize a system. Unlike a virus, however, it is easily thwarted by mismanagement. Yet it is what we need in order to address the often capricious but large-scale, interconnected challenges facing individuals, communities, organizations, countries, and the world.

Ambitious perhaps – but we have to figure out how to do it. Global challenges make it imperative that we develop our ability to learn together. We need a social discipline of learning to get better at increasing our social learning capability in and across systems.

Virology as a discipline requires cross-disciplinary synergies. People across professions combine their knowledge of a microbial ecosystem to address the challenge of an infectious disease spreading in different ways across the globe. Similarly the discipline of social learning calls for combining knowledge across boundaries to make progress on issues that have systemic consequences at multiple levels of scale.

In our work we are increasingly invited to help people convene social learning spaces in which those cross-boundary encounters can take place. From health and education to agriculture and ecology to business and government, we are seeing the need to bring together multiple stakeholders across different domains and across different national, cultural or social boundaries so that they can bring their combined energy to address a common problem.

A social learning space allows people to develop a shared practice and a shared identity around a problem. In combating infectious diseases people from traditionally separate disciplines such as human health, animal health and wildlife need to be able to see each other as learning partners, developing a shared language and shared identity to be able to talk about the problem on a systems level. This shared identity anchored in the development of a shared practice is a condition for the social learning space to function and be sustainable.

Creating social learning spaces and convening cross-boundary encounters are just some of the ways we are exploring in order to develop the theory and practice of social learning capability. One thing we know is that we have much to learn from viruses and infectious diseases if we are to keep up with the speed, unpredictability, and scale of the challenges facing us in the 21st century.

—

Etienne and Beverly write about this and other similar themes on their blog (http://wenger-trayner.com) where they are in the process of sharing the resources they produce. They also run online and face-to-face workshops in July/August, which bring together people from different organizations and sectors to work on some of these issues. See http://wenger-trayner.com/betreat.

See also:

“Virology in the 21st Century” by L.W. Enquist in Microbe magazine, July 2009http://www.microbemagazine.org/index.php/07-2009-home/449-virology-in-the-21st-century

You (almost) never know who’s paying attention

Posted by sustainable on April 5, 2012 

I was struck by Mark Reed’s blog about knowledge management and it made me think along these lines:

When Francis Bacon said that knowledge was power he was right, but he lived in a world where information was much harder to find than nowadays.  There were no daily newspapers, few books, no radio, no TV, no mobile phones and no internet.  Bacon may have been thirsting for knowledge but many of us these days are trying to avoid being bombarded with facts and opinions.  People complain about the number of emails and texts they receive and about the horrors of being social in social media.

Think then, how difficult it is to influence a decision maker – let’s say a Government Minister – whom everyone wants to influence. Think how much effort he or she makes to avoid being told what to do! And getting through those defences was the type of task I faced in a former job as the Conservation Director of the RSPB – Europe’s largest (and best!) nature conservation charity.

If only, I thought, I could sit down and have a 10 minute chat every day with the Secretary of State or the relevant Minister I bet I could persuade them to do what we wanted – or at least to consider our views seriously alongside all the other views with which they were presented.  Sometimes you get that 10-minute, or 30-minute chat with the Minister but it’s often a pretty formal affair and usually in a group of people who are sounding off on their subjects too.

The closest I got to those daily, longed for, conversations was starting to write a daily blog about conservation issues and the RSPB’s work.  These weren’t written just for Government Ministers but I always had them in mind and the timing of some blogs was deliberately timed to try to influence decisions.

When I left the RSPB I published a selection of my blogs as a book Blogging for Nature and I asked Hilary Benn, the former Secretary of State at Defra whether he’d be prepared to write a Foreword for it – and slightly to my surprise, but also to my delight, he said ‘yes’.  In his Foreword he wrote ‘If I was ever in any doubt about what people at The Lodge (the RSPB’s headquarters) thought I should do next, all I had to do was bring up Mark’s blog – if my advisors hadn’t already put his latest entry into my red box that night!’.

What can we learn from this in terms of communications lessons?

1. Ignore social media at your peril – just because it’s new doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant.  It doesn’t mean it is relevant to your needs either – but don’t discount it out of hand.
2. Social media allow you to communicate with many people at once – and some of those may be just the people with whom you would love to communicate more regularly face to face.
3. If your social media communications are obviously popular (your blogs get comments, your Twitter account has lots of followers) then everyone who reads your words knows that lots of others are reading them too so they have more clout. So put effort into building your audience.
4. You rarely know who is paying attention to you – most influence is unknown to you and you only get rare glimpses to show you that your words hit home – so keep going and don’t despair (you may be winning when you don’t know it).

Good luck!

Dr Mark Avery is a freelance writer on environmental matters.  He writes a daily blog Standing up for Naturewww.markavery.info  His book, Blogging for Nature is available fromwww.lulu.com/product/paperback/blogging-for-nature/15539870 and contains tips on how to blog successfully as well as 143 blogs written on wildlife and environmental matters between 2009 and 2011.

Learning is fundamental to our capacity to cope with future social-ecological change. But how do we stimulate the ‘right’ kind of learning, and how will we know if we succeed or fail?

 Posted by sustainable on April 30, 2012 

I am sitting in a high ceilinged community hall in rural South Africa. Cattle graze on short dry grass outside the door, and participants look pinched from the cold breeze that whistles under the doors and through a broken window. We have just finished an activity that saw all nine of us holding hands, tangled up with one another, and trying to get untangled. We succeeded, with some cheating. The facilitator tells us this activity is symbolic of what will be needed to overcome the challenges that the community faces: it will require everyone to be present, conscious of the actions of others, and mindful of their interconnectedness. She does not mention the cheating.

This is the second year of regular interaction with a small group of people who have been taken through a process of thinking about what vulnerability means in their community, how it is experienced by individuals and households, and how people are responding to it. We have used narratives, drama, dance, large community meetings and small focus groups to tell stories about local experiences of vulnerability in the context of multiple stressors, particularly climate change and HIV/Aids. Ultimately, over a period of three years, we want to get to a point where we have taken a core group of individuals through a process of exploring local experiences of vulnerability, responses to those experiences, what people could do to respond, and why they are not doing these things. Finally we want to reach to a point where the group begins to work with the community to break down barriers to adaptation. The hope, and the intention, is that the learning process will transcend the core group and become located within the social networks or/and communities of practice that participants belong to. We are testing the idea that by changing the way a small group of individuals think about themselves in relation to their community and the challenges it faces, we will have a larger impact on the community more broadly. In other words, we are testing a methodology for social learning. This is a long shot, but worth a try.

As we take these individuals through this learning process, the facilitators are attempting to monitor learning outcomes for those involved. This means documenting what both the community participants and the facilitators are learning as we go along, and using this to adjust our interactions with one another and to be mindful of the path we are walking together. We all have an idea of where we want to get to – we want to identify and break down barriers to adaptation, and we want this to happen in the broader community, not just this core group. But we are not entirely sure how we will get there. This year we will use social network analysis to explore how far, if at all, learning is ‘moving’ from this core group into the broader community. We hope that this will shed light on the kinds of impact a sustained participatory process such as this might expect to have in a rural community struggling with so many social and ecological challenges.

As we reflect on the learning that has taken place during the day’s activities in the community hall, I look around at the faces of women and men who I have seen cry as they told stories of their experiences of vulnerability. They say that they have learned about the importance of sharing their painful stories, they have learned that the person sitting next to them also lost a loved one to HIV/Aids. They have learned that their individual actions to help others are important. I can’t help but wonder if this is really worthwhile, and I return time and again to same thought: is participation the new tyranny, as Cooke and Kothari (2001) warned? How do I make this worth these people’s time? And then I am reminded why we are monitoring and evaluating this process as we go along, and I am committed anew to critically evaluating the learning outcomes of participatory processes.

This research is funded by the International Development Research Center, and supported by numerous researchers in the Department of Environmental Science at Rhodes University.

Dr Georgina Cundill,
Environmental Learning Research Center, Rhodes University
Website: http://georginacundill.blogspot.com/

Cooking up sustainability – permaculture style

Posted by sustainable on May 14, 2012 

Permaculture is on a mission to create sustainable settlements, and we take a popular education approach to making it happen. We’re like ‘applied socio-ecological-systems design’ for the rest of us, or put another way, we make vitally important concepts and skills accessible to everyday people. Since the publication of Permaculture One (Mollison and Holmgren,1976), many thousands of people have been trained in permaculture design through two week design courses, specialist courses and other trainings, and many more have picked up a book and got on with it themselves. Some of the students have degrees, many don’t. Illiterate villagers in Cambodia, displaced peasants in El Salvador, and angry residents getting by on high deprivation estates in Glasgow join privileged Californians and middle class consultants from Hampshire on a mission to make things better.

Now in use in 130 countries around the world, permaculture is behind some of the world’s most advanced systems of sustainability and influencing new initiatives like the Blue Economy and Transition Towns. In this wider discussion about ‘sustainable learning’, I want to reflect on what I think some of the vital ingredients have been for permaculture’s impact.

Recipe for a transformation towards a sustainable culture

Take a large world, multiple languages, eco-regions, climates, cultures and perspectives. Throw in a variety of interconnected social, economic and environmental challenges. Then add:

1. Ethics and a shared mission. Engage fellow learners by identifying a shared ethical framework that can drive each person as both independent actors, and also as team players working towards a common goal.

2. ‘Ground rules’ of sharing and cooperation. Remind learners that we can’t possible know everything ourselves, or have the skills to do everything ourselves, so lets learn and value the skills of sharing and cooperation. Learn together, work together. No one will achieve sustainability on their own.

3. Nature as model. Foster the ability to ‘think and act like an ecosystem’. Recognise eco-literacy as a fundamental skill required by every human. It’s a cultural shift from ‘universe as machine’ to ‘universe as living process’. It’s inevitable, go with it. Play games, use the whole body, write poems and stories, take more walks in nature, make it normal.

4. Self-reliance, local adaptation and innovation. Foster a respect for autonomy, self-determination and local initiatives. Value a diversity of approaches and recognise the value in people working it out for themselves. One size does not fit all. Local conditions matter, so local people need to be at the centre of their own innovation for sustainability.

5. Commitment to the whole learning cycle. Observe and interact, or put another way use an ‘action research’ / ‘action learning’ approach. “Just do it” doesn’t help if you are doing it wrong, so ensure that the cycle of planning, doing, observing and reflecting is embedded in our learning and practice. A key challenge for academia is how to connect to the action, so we can maximise its potential to support local learning and action through increased access to detailed observation and analysis.

6. Communities of practice. If you want to learn to knit, hang around people that knit. Promote learning by doing, and foster networks and opportunities for new learners to work with existing practitioners. Recognise the value of practitioners as key sources of learning and innovation. Support them to innovate, learn from their practice. Each ‘sustainability action’ is an opportunity for learning. How many people does it take to change an eco-lightbulb?

7. Get political. We need to change the rules of the game. To do this we need people with critical thinking skills and independence of thought, and the courage to speak and act against the status quo. So we need to nurture leadership skills and raise awareness of the challenges as well as the opportunities.

Don’t get me wrong, permaculture certainly doesn’t have it all right. One of our key limiting factors at the moment is a general lack of empirical data and systematic monitoring of the results of our work. Essentially we are still learning how to utilise the whole action research / action learning cycle. This means there is an opportunity to further accelerate our learning through increased reflection on ‘what works’. But we are often getting to the limit of what we can do at a grassroots level, so we need new alliances with scientists.

To tackle this, plans are being developed to create an ‘International Permaculture Research Protocol’ that would use a series of agreed headings and a variety of monitoring systems to enhance local and network learning and generate consistent data that can be aggregated for wider analysis. We are keen to hear from academics and practitioners alike who are aware of scientifically rigorous and  simple to use methods to assess factors such as soil health, carbon storage, biodiversity, participation and social well-being.

Permaculture is an ‘action learning network for sustainability’ full of pioneers and early adopters. There is an opportunity to use the nearly 40 years of practical experimentation and our global network of practitioners to accelerate progress towards a more stable society working in harmony with the living planet. To do that we need to connect with new partners for the next cycle of learning.

Get in touch, we’d love to hear from you.

Andy Goldring, andyg@permaculture.org.uk
CEO, Permaculture Association
www.permaculture.org.uk

P.S. The International Permaculture Research Survey (Part 1) is now online. If you are researching permaculture or related subjects and can spare 10-15 minutes, please go to:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/irs1 for the survey itself, and

http://www.permaculture.org.uk/international-permaculture-research-project for information about the survey.

How do we know what we know about climate change? Five key undisputed points about global warming.

Posted by sustainable on June 1, 2012 Blog Add comments

There has been much discussion about whether global warming is caused by human activity and whether it will lead to global warming. However, there are a number of undisputed points that society has learnt from science that lead to clear conclusions that global warming is caused by human activity. These key points are the culmination of over 150 years of learning that has resulted in questions about the sustainability of human society. Individually, the points don’t tell us much about sustainability. But together, they provide a clear and succinct ‘story’ that leads to clear conclusions. This story can be used to explain to others how we know what we know about climate change. They also highlight the importance of science for enhancing sustainable learning.

The Five Points of Global Warming:

1. Observations show that the level of carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere. Direct observations since the 1950s clearly show the yearly increase in carbon dioxide.
2. We know that this rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide is due to the burning of fossil fuels and not volcanoes. Carbon dioxide comes in two ‘flavors’ based on the two stable carbon atoms, Carbon-12 and Carbon-13. Fossil fuels are rich in Carbon-12. When we burn fossil fuels we put more Carbon-12 in the atmosphere relative to Carbon-13, which is precisely what is observed in the  record of increasing carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere.
3. Carbon dioxide is a gas that is very efficient at producing a greenhouse effect. This has been known for over 150 years. In 1859 John Tyndall carried out laboratory experiments where he placed different gases in a container and measured how these individual gases absorbed heat radiation (longwave radiation). He found that carbon dioxide is a very efficient greenhouse gas compared to other gases.
4. Thus, increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide will increase the greenhouse effect of Earth. Increasing carbon dioxide traps more heat radiation leaving Earth’s surface, which is called the greenhouse effect.
5. The Earth’s surface must warm from this increase in the greenhouse effect. This is a result of the first law of thermodynamics, which is an expression of the conversation of energy. The first law of thermodynamics is an undisputed law that was first formulated in 1850 by Rudolf Clausius. The trapped energy (heat radiation) must result in a warming of Earth’s surface as it has nowhere else to go.

These five points of global warming are validated by observations of Earth’s deep past. Millions of years ago Earth’s atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were higher than today. The past increase in carbon dioxide was due to the very slow build-up of carbon dioxide over hundreds of thousands to millions of years from volcanic activity, as compared to the very rapid build-up today due to the burning of fossil fuels. Observations show that when atmospheric carbon dioxide was higher in the past, Earth was warmer.

This is important for understanding where we are heading in the future. For if we continue to burn fossil fuels at their current rate, then atmospheric carbon dioxide levels will be 800 to 1100 parts per million in concentration by 2100 compared to 396 parts per million now. The last time there was that much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 30 to 40 million years ago. At that time Earth was very warm and there was little evidence of glacier formations on either Greenland or Antarctica and much higher sea levels.

All of the points made above are based on direct observations and the fundamental law of conservation of energy. They are not dependent on the results of climate models. However, results from climate models are in agreement with these observed facts. Overall, the points highlight that continued release of carbon dioxide as a result of human activity will inevitably result in global warming and there is evidence from scientific studies that this is already occurring.

Jeffrey T. Kiehl is a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, USA. He is the head of the Climate Change Research Section and has carried out research on Earth’s past, present and future climates for over 30 years.

There is more than one way to see the world.

Posted by sustainable on June 18, 2012 

 Sometimes places and people remind me of things I have done that seem to have helped someone learn new things.  They remind me of things I have done in learning to be a teacher, a coach and researcher since 1965.

During the early eighties, when I was developing undergraduate courses at the University of Wales, Bangor, I met a pupil to whom I had introduced the ‘delights’ of rugby union football during my very first year in teaching.  He recognised me but I did not recognise him.  That was perhaps understandable.  He explained that he had only been in one ninety-minute class with me when I was a replacement for an absent colleague.  He reminded me of the field on which we were ‘learning’ the game about which I was so passionate.  (I was, and still try to be, passionate about everything I try to teach and learn.)  It was a bleak, wind-swept and grey mountainside in the pennine hills of North Derbyshire.  It was raining.  It was often raining.  Even after nearly twenty years he remembered that lesson and thanked me for it.  He had not enjoyed it.  He said that afterwards he had vowed never to play rugby again!  It was not the game – just the ‘horizontal’ weather.  The emotional consequences of the wind and rain and the frustration of a ball that did not bounce properly were too much.  He went back to playing with a round ball.  He was, after all, a talented soccer player.  He also began to take his art increasingly seriously and eventually graduated through Art College.  He is now a successful potter.

Examining the unintended consequences of things we do is often a good way of calibrating our understanding of the world and the things we do in it.  Acknowledging such unexpected consequences can enhance our capacity to vary the perspectives we adopt in relation to the things that matter to us.  In grounding an experience in the different viewpoints we might take we can explore and elaborate our theoretical understanding.  If an unanticipated outcome is not understandable using our current framework for explaining things, then we need both to rethink the conceptual structures on which we normally rely and examine why, how and what we are doing.  However, as a former, much respected colleague once said, ‘if your data do not support your hypothesis you are just doing the wrong experiments’.  Of course we get most excited when findings are counter-intuitive but turn out have a perfectly sound theoretical explanation.  In the field of learning and knowledge exchange, and especially in education in institutional settings, the intuitive but demonstrably not the best approach often still hold sway.  This is in spite of evidence pointing to different and better ways of doing things and different ways of explaining them.

Much of what I taught undergraduates in universities was about how people learn.  I taught about the practice conditions that lead to adaptive expertise.  I taught them about how experts continue to practise to enable them to perform in circumstances that less expert participants find distressing and disruptive.  Colleagues taught about self-determination theory, social learning and cultural development.  We applied the theories to the shaping and structuring of our students’ learning experiences.  We devised ways and means that allowed direct experience of the theoretical constructs that they were studying (understanding is seen as the multi-dimensional space of experience).

We applied those ideas in how we were exploring the content of the courses together.  The key was to create a ‘micro culture’ that recruited the power of social learning and provided opportunities for learning that were not inherent in the pre-existing culture of the university.  The lock to be opened required structuring variations of practice in perspective, process and product that strengthened both the capability to do what was required and the sensitivity to the contexts which demanded variation.  The counter intuitive feature of this is that whilst the ability to do something is logically separable from the perception of what is required, the two facets are functionally inseparable.  Practising one always has an impact on the other.  The force to turn the key in the lock was the intention to succeed and we celebrated success.  These elements promote the disposition to be a ‘good learner’.  They are the conditions that are explainable as the grounds for developing powerful intrinsic motivation to learn.  The door this key and lock open is access to emergent adaptive expertise.  That idea and the related one of developing a strong disposition for ‘good’ learning have to be strong precursors to potential solutions to much of what we are now concerned.  We have to build them into our attempts to develop sustainable leaders, social learning capability and adaptive knowledge managers.

Next month I shall be leading an intensive workshop in writing, finishing and publishing academic papers with the colleagues of a former student.  He was one the participants in the learning experiments that were my early courses and is now a university course leader.  There is a sense in which this exemplifies sustainable learning.  It persists.  What I have learned also persists.  We will be back in Derbyshire.  If it is raining, we will be indoors.  I like to believe that I can now better predict the outcomes of what I do!

This entry is written by John Fazey

How to be an effective knowedge manager

Posted by sustainable on January 27, 2012  

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It has often been said that “knowledge is power”. The pursuit of knowledge has built civilisations and led to their downfall. Governments invest in research that they hope will generate knowledge to power their economies and heal their sick. New knowledge is being generated every day about the world we live in, and is increasingly at our fingertips via the internet. But how can we filter out misleading information and harness the power of this knowledge to manage our environment more effectively in the face of social and climate change?

Knowledge Management

Knowledge management is increasingly seen as critical for effective management of social- ecological relationships. In parallel to its importance for effective environmental manage- ment, there is increasing pressure from universities to enhance the impact of research through meaningful knowledge management. Knowledge exchange is one aspect of knowledge management gaining recent attention. There are many definitions of knowledge exchange, but generally it refers to the process of sharing, using, and co-generating information through various methods that are appropriate to the context, audience and purpose of communication. In the context of sustainability ‘knowledge exchange’ is often seen as a means for creating new sustainable outcomes and behaviours. In this stage of the Sustainable Uplands project we are working to build an evidence base for the sorts of knowledge exchange process that are most likely to achieve their goals, and to improve our theoretical under- standing of how knowledge exchange processes work.

Why do we need an improved approach to knowledge management?

In our latest briefing note we consider how to be an effective knowledge manager, so we can work together more effectively for a sustainable future. There has been a growing emphasis on finding ways to improve the communication, accessibility, and the potential impact of research findings in social, environmental and economic contexts. This has led to an abundance of approaches and methods for communicating and exchanging knowledge, which have yet to be properly evaluated. However, the majority of processes are rarely founded on current understanding of how knowledge is generated, exchanged and transformed in socio-ecological systems. It is rarely recognised that the way knowledge is perceived and constructed will affect the process and outcomes of knowledge exchange processes; this has implications for the co- generation, acceptance and use of knowledge, and ultimately, how complex sustainability problems are approached and knowledge is manage. To read more about becoming an effective knowledge manager download our brief and feel free to add your voice to this discussion. We would love to hear your thoughts!

Mark and the Sustainable Learning team

Policy Brief: how to be an effective knowledge manager

The art of science communication: can the creative arts can bring a new dimension to your research?

Posted by sustainable on January 11, 2012 

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Artists often work with researchers to communicate their findings; but is it possible for artists to join interdisciplinary teams to come up with new knowledge and insights about the world around us? After all, for many artists, their goal is to make us look differently at the world, to stumble upon new insights and think differently. And these goals are shared by many researchers in their quest to generate new knowledge. So why is it that although it is now common to see social and natural scientists working together (and even collaborations between the physical sciences and the arts and humanities), it is rare to see artists working as equals alongside researchers in interdisciplinary teams? There has been a frame-shift for many natural scientists in recent years, who no longer see social scientists as an “add-on” to help them communicate their research, but now genuinely value the new insights that social science can bring, and work with social scientists as equals. The creative arts however, are still seen by many researchers as an “add-on”, whose only role is to help communicate the “real” research done by the social and natural scientists

So, is it possible to integrate creative practitioners into interdisciplinary teams? Can we value their methods and knowledge equally alongside those of researchers to co-generate new knowledge and insights together? I’ve not managed to do this yet, but I’ve had some tantalising glimpses of what might be possible, and have started integrating artists into many of the funding proposals I’m now writing. I’d love to hear from you if you’ve had similar glimpses, or if you can share stories of genuinely interdisciplinary collaborations with artists that we could all learn from?

My first real experience of working with creative practitioners was during a residency at the Aberdeen Centre for Environmental Sustainability earlier this year. Huw Warren, a jazz pianist and contemporary composer, was one of the people we were working with. We met at the studio of sculptor, Helen Denerly, one of the other artists in residence, in the Cairngorms National Park.

My conversation with Huw started beside a stream in the valley that Helen Denerly’s studio is built in. For years, a heron had visited that particular spot in the river, and after it had stopped returning, Helen sculpted an iron arch over the place it used to stand, with a tone poem about the heron, by the Orkadian poet, George Mackay Brown, inscribed in runes along its edge. On one side of the river was improved pasture, on the other side, rough grazing, turning to moor and forest. The arch was located at the intersection between a whole series of different land uses, and the river seemed to connect them all. I wondered to Huw if it might be possible to capture through music, this intersection of uses and the layers of differing values that lead to so many different benefits and to so many conflicts. I had no idea how that might be possible through music, but felt there was something structural about this layering of uses and meanings, which he might perhaps be able to use?

So in the piece that Huw wrote, “Never Let Me Go”, there is a tonal arch that repeats, at its core – small arches that go up and down, each slightly different, all building into one great over-arching tonal ark that forms through the whole piece. As I was listening to him play, I found myself standing by the river with him again. I could see the light reflecting from the river on the underside of Helen’s arch, creating a thousand overlapping arches dancing within arches – my eye was tracing the arch itself from one side of the river to the other, and I was slowly becoming aware of the ark of sky over my head.

An arch is a self-supporting structure, but as we all know, if you take out any single stone, the whole structure collapses. Of course, this is very much like the self-supporting structures that exist in the natural world, and the structures within structures that occur naturally all around us – populations of species, co-existing within habitats, which in turn are part of a wider ecosystem. Take out the “key-stone”, or any stone for that matter, and the whole structure collapses.

But what I as an environmental researcher might see as an assemblage of species and habitats, my wife is likely to see as a spectacular view (I have a nasty habit of missing the view for looking at the roadside plants); my children are more likely to see it as a place to collect what they call “beasties” (insects to the rest of us); the farmer is going to see what we’re looking at as their livelihood. Perhaps my children’s children will have a far greater appreciation of the carbon locked up in the vegetation and soil that makes up this landscape – especially if they are grappling with the consequences of letting that carbon return to the atmosphere. We all see a slightly different arch when we look at this landscape: each of these arches is a human, cultural construct – including conservation. And each of these constructions can, under certain circumstances, be vulnerable to collapse.

So do we try and build our conservation arch stronger, replacing stones with solid iron, as Helen Denerly did? Or do we stop and look harder, and notice the many other arches we had previously overlooked – and perhaps go further, and spend some time sitting under one of those arches, reading the runes, absorbing what it is to be a farmer, to be a child of our children?

And this brings me to the key thing I’ve learned from both Huw and Helen’s work: empathy. Empathy is simply being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. My dictionary defines it as the power of being able to enter someone else’s personality and imaginatively experience his or her experiences. I believe empathy is a skill we all need as researchers, and it is something we can learn and always get better at. But for many of us, this is a fundamental challenge though: to practice empathy we have to accept that we might not always be right; that whether we agree with the basis of their arguments or not, other people have different and often deeply cherished perspectives; we need to learn how to respect these as valid opinions, so we can truly engage with and learn from each other. This means accepting that there may not be one objective truth that we can reveal through science, but that there are multiple, competing ways of explaining the world and our place in it. The sooner we can accept this more messy, multi-layered way of looking at the world, the sooner I believe we will be able to start really doing research hand-in-hand with the people who depend on the species and habitats we are trying to protect. This will mean compromise, but I believe in the long-run, it will also mean that we can achieve goals that we all share, far more effectively and with far less conflict.

Since my conversation with Huw at Helen’s studio, I’ve worked with the 20:20 Vision photography collective and singer-songwriters, Stephen and Ilse Ogston, to develop a music video, and worked with a story-teller and illustrator to produce a children’s story book about our research on peat bogs. These initiatives have been more about communicating existing knowledge than they’ve been about co-generating new knowledge together, but each collaboration has re-awakened the wonder that originally inspired me to become an environmental researcher. As researchers we are all of course in the business of communicating our findings in peer-reviewed journal articles – the Sustainable Uplands team has produced over 50 of them now. But when we’re dealing with issues as complex and value-laden as those surrounding the environment, then I personally believe there is a need to communicate in ways that engage people’s hearts as well as their minds; that get people to interrogate their assumptions at the level of their values and beliefs. And what better way to do that than through the arts?

But is it possible to go further than this, to actually work alongside artists to come up with new insights that we couldn’t otherwise have generated? I feel as though I’ve had glimpses of this that I want to explore in future research project, but I’m not sure I’ve proven this point yet. What do you think? I’d love to hear your stories…

Watch Huw Warren playing “Never Let Me Go”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJNbbLPt18o

Download an mp3 of “Never Let Me Go”: http://huwwarren.bandcamp.com/track/never-let-me-go

Today’s innovation is tomorrow’s mainstream

 Posted by sustainable on January 11, 2012 

Nowadays it’s a given that everyone in communications wants to get their messages across via the latest tv drama.  We know that if a character on one of the popular soaps suffers from a serious disease doctors surgeries will be inundated with patients wanting to be tested, or if a social problem such as domestic violence is aired, support groups will either applaud or condemn the way it is handled, conscious of the potential influence.   But back in the 1950 this was a pretty novel idea.  Food production was a high priority following the second world war, with rationing only recently ended.  At the same time scientists were coming up with a lot of new ideas that could potentially boost yields.  Joining up research and practice was vital.  Exactly who came up with the idea of using radio drama – whether it was some bright spark in the Ministry of Agriculture or a BBC producer – seems to be lost in the mists of time, but it led to a pilot for “The Archers – an everyday story of country folk”.   The series quickly caught the imagination, not just of the farming community, but of the whole country.  Not only was it a useful means of communicating the latest MAFF directive, it helped an increasingly urban population to keep in touch with the countryside.   Some might say it has perpetuated stereotypes, but it certainly came in useful for a townie like me when I applied for the post of Science Communications Manager for the Rural Economy and Land Use Programme.  I even cited it in my job interview as an example of innovation in communications and suggested that if appointed, I would like to adopt a similarly creative approach to getting research across to stakeholders.

That was five years ago and I think during that time Relu has been adventurous in its knowledge exchange strategy, as well as in its key features of interdisciplinarity and stakeholder involvement .  In fact those three elements work together.  Our publications aim to be accessible and non-academic in tone and draw on stakeholder expertise as well as academic research, using language that may be understood by non-specialists.  Cartoons by David Haldane of The Times have made several Relu briefing papers particularly memorable.  In a few lines, he speaks volumes about Relu and scientific research.

Relu conferences have been opportunities for interaction, rather than events where the audience sits and listens to academic papers.  Over the years they have featured a video feed-back box where delegates could give their views, speed-dating sessions, books of vouchers which stakeholders use to “sign up” as visiting fellows to projects, interactive, science-fair type activities, on-line and real life debates and “X-Factor” style awards.  The Sustainable Uplands Project has taken this creative approach further than most, with their songs and storytelling.  The whole programme has been an experiment in how to do science.  I think it is one of the signs of success that these kinds of approaches no longer seem so revolutionary.  Interdisciplinarity?  Surely everyone is doing it?  Stakeholder involvement?  It’s a given, surely?  And innovative knowledge exchange?  Well, it’s going to be the fun events that people remember, we all know that.  I would like to think that, just like The Archers, suddenly we are mainstream, because if Relu has a legacy, this creative approach to knowledge exchange needs to be a major part of it.

Want to know more?

Useful documents available on the Relu website are:

Relu Briefing Paper 6 Common Knowledge: An exploration of knowledge transfer

Relu Briefing paper 10 Telling stories: Accounting for knowledge exchange

Relu Briefing Paper 16 Adventures in Science: Interdisciplinarity and knowledge exchange in the Relu Programme

And you can Read my blog.

How to design more effective participatory decision-making processes

 Posted by sustainable on January 11, 2012 

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Working with stakeholders is often challenging. There seem to always be difficult characters to deal with, and you often end up working with people who are in conflict with one another – or worse – in conflict with you. But the promise of stakeholder participation is still alluring: democracy in action; smarter and more popular decisions, designed by and supported by the people who have to implement them.

So how can you design participatory processes that can effectively engage stakeholders in policy decisions? How can we harness participation to achieve social and environmental benefits, but avoid the pitfalls?

1. Start talking to people as soon as you can

Stakeholder participation should be considered right from the outset, from concept development and planning, through implementation, to monitoring and evaluation of outcomes. Engagement with stakeholders as early as possible in decision-making has been frequently cited as essential if participatory processes are to lead to high quality and durable decisions. Typically, stakeholders only get involved in decision-making at the implementation phase of the project cycle, and not in earlier project identification and preparation phases. Increasingly they may also be involved in monitoring and evaluating the outcomes of the decision-making process. However, unless flexibility can be built into the project design, this can mean that stakeholders are invited to get involved in a project that is at odds with their own needs and priorities. This may make it a challenge to motivate stakeholders to engage with the decision-making process, and those who are engaged may be placed in a reactive position, where they are asked to respond to proposals that they perceive to have already have been finalised. In contrast to this, a number of projects have shown how stakeholders could be actively engaged in sampling design, data collection and analysis, in addition to more traditional roles.

2. Make sure you’re talking to the right people

One of the main ingredients for successful participation, and at the same time one of the main challenges, is the selection and actual involvement of appropriate participants. It is often difficult to identify who should be involved, but getting the right mix is crucial for the legitimacy of the process. The selection of participants also significantly influences the nature of the outputs. As a result, “stakeholder analysis” is increasingly being used to systematically represent those relevant to environmental decision-making processes. Stakeholder analysis is a process that: (i) defines aspects of a social and natural system affected by a decision or action, (ii) identifies individuals and groups who are affected by or can affect those parts of the system (this may include non-human and non-living entities and future generations), and; (iii) prioritises these individuals and groups for involvement in the decision-making process. A wide variety of tools and approaches have been used for stakeholder analysis to: (i) identify stakeholders; (ii) differentiate between and categorise stakeholders; and (iii) investigate relationships between stakeholders (for more details, see: Reed et al., 2009).

3. Make sure you know what people want to talk about

In order to design an appropriate process using relevant tools, it is essential to clearly articulate the goals towards which the group will be working. This is closely linked to stakeholder analysis and may take place as part of such an analysis, where system boundaries and issues are identified alongside those who hold a stake in what happens to the system under investigation. This may require negotiation, and different stakeholders may have irreconcilable objectives. If the goals are developed through dialogue (making trade-offs where necessary) between participants, they are more likely to take ownership of the process, partnership building will be more likely, and the outcomes are more likely to be more relevant to stakeholder needs and priorities, motivating their ongoing active engagement.

4. Be flexible: base level of participation and methods on your context and objectives

Participatory methods can only be chosen once the objectives of the process have been clearly articulated, a level of engagement has been identified that is appropriate to those objectives, and relevant stakeholders have been selected for inclusion in the process. For example, there are many methods that can be used to communicate (e.g. information dissemination via leaflets or the mass media, hotlines and public meetings), consult (e.g. consultation documents, opinion polls and referendums, focus groups and surveys) or participate (e.g. citizen’s juries, consensus conferences, task-forces and public meetings with voting) with stakeholders. Methods must also be adapted to the decision-making context, including socio-cultural and environmental factors (for example, methods that require participants to read or write should be avoided in groups that might include illiterate participants). Depending on the power dynamics of the group, methods may need to be employed that equalize power between participants to avoid marginalising the voices of the less powerful. Those who feel marginalised during decision-making may delay or prevent implementation through litigation.

5. Get a facilitator

Don’t underestimate the power of a good facilitator to bring people together and deliver high quality outcomes.The outcome of any participatory process is far more sensitive to the manner in which it is conducted than the tools that are used. Highly skilled facilitation is particular important in the uplands, given the high likelihood of dealing with conflict, for example between conservationists and resource users. Different facilitators can use the same tools with radically different outcomes, depending on their skill level. Such skills include technical expertise in the use of different tools. However, it is sometimes the most seemingly simple of methods, such as informal group discussion, which require the greatest expertise. A successful facilitator needs to be perceived as impartial, open to multiple perspectives and approachable. They need to be capable of maintaining positive group dynamics, handling dominating or offensive individuals, encourage participants to question assumptions and re-evaluate entrenched positions, and get the most out of reticent individuals. Such skills are difficult to learn and tend to be developed through years of experience, intuition and empathy.

6. Put local and scientific knowledge on an equal footing

The need for scientific information and analysis to inform stakeholder deliberation has been identified by many authors as an essential ingredient in any participatory process. It is argued that local stakeholders may be able to learn from scientific sources of knowledge and so make more informed decisions in highly technical decision-making contexts, for example using Citizens’ Juries. Equally, by taking local knowledge into account, researchers may have their assumptions and validity of results questioned, leading to further investigation and a more rigorous understanding of the issues they are investigating. Following from this, cross-fertilisation of ideas between these different sources of knowledge may provide more comprehensive information upon which to base decisions, which may increase their robustness and durability. Having said this, opponents argue that local knowledge may be exaggerated or distorted, and irrelevant to “scientific” nature of much modern environmental management. On this basis, concerns have been expressed that integrating scientific and local knowledge bases will inevitably involve a trade-off between meaningful participation and scientific rigour. However, the same critique can be made of scientific knowledge, which should also not be uncritically accepted without evaluating the uncertainty and associated value judgments in the claims being made. If we consider local and scientific knowledge to be equally valid, it is necessary to subject each to an appropriate level of scrutiny, before considering what exactly may be integrated.

So what is Social Learning?

Posted by sustainable on January 11, 2012

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It was summer 2009 or thereabouts and I was in the last stage of my PhD working on my final chapter ‘High levels of participation in conservation projects enhance learning’ and trying to work out if the learning I had noted in my research could be defined as social learning.

But what exactly does the phrase ‘social learning’ mean? Some kind of cross collaboration? Participation? Learning in a social setting? It was hard to work out despite the many papers I had ploughed through. So at an Aberdeen Centre for Environmental Sustainability pub lunch Mark (Reed) and I were sat together and we found ourselves spending the whole meal discussing the concept and comparing notes. As the year progressed we joined with others to share ideas and research the concept, culminating in our 2010 paper ‘what is social learning?’

In our paper we write:

‘Social learning is often conflated with other concepts such as participation and proenvironmental behavior, and there is often little distinction made between individual and wider social learning. Many unsubstantiated claims for social learning exist, and there is frequently confusion between the concept itself and its potential outcomes. This lack of conceptual clarity has limited our capacity to assess whether social learning has occurred, and if so, what kind of learning has taken place, to what extent, between whom, when, and how. This response attempts to provide greater clarity on the conceptual basis for social learning.We argue that to be considered social learning, a process must:

(1)   demonstrate that a change in understanding has taken place in the individuals involved;

(2)   demonstrate that this change goes beyond the individual and becomes situated within wider social units or communities of practice; and

(3)  occur through social interactions and processes between actors within a social network.

A clearer picture of what we mean by social learning could enhance our ability to critically evaluate outcomes and better understand the processes through which social learning occurs. In this way, it may be possible to better facilitate the desired outcomes of social learning processes.’

What is Social Learning? Resilience 2011 presentation

View more presentations from Aberdeen CES