“It was Hard to Come to Mutual Understanding …”—The Multidimensionality of Social Learning Processes Concerned with Sustainable Natural Resource Use in India, Africa and Latin America

Abstract

Sustainable natural resource use requires that multiple actors reassess their situation in a systemic perspective. This can be conceptualised as a social learning process between actors from rural communities and the experts from outside organisations. A specifically designed workshop oriented towards a systemic view of natural resource use and the enhancement of mutual learning between local and external actors, provided the background for evaluating the potentials and constraints of intensified social learning processes. Case studies in rural communities in India, Bolivia, Peru and Mali showed that changes in the narratives of the participants of the workshop followed a similar temporal sequence relatively independently from their specific contexts. Social learning processes were found to be more likely to be successful if they 1) opened new space for communicative action, allowing for an intersubjective re-definition of the present situation, 2) contributed to rebalance the relationships between social capital and social, emotional and cognitive competencies within and between local and external actors.

Using Participatory Scenarios to Stimulate Social Learning for Collaborative Sustainable Development

“…The concept of social learning holds promise for sustainable management of complex social-ecological systems (Steyaert and Jiggins 2007) as researchers and managers seek to understand the mechanisms behind effective participatory environmental management processes. Recently, social learning has been studied in community forest management (Wollenberg et al 2000), water resources (Ison et al 2007, Steyaert and Jiggins 2007, Pahl-Wostl et al 2008, the use of natural resources (Rist et al 2006), wildlife management (Schusler et al 2003), and environmental risk assessment (Dana and Nelson in press) among other contexts. In particular, social learning is central to the concepts of adaptive management (Holling 1978) and adaptive comanagement (Olsson et al 2004, Berkes 2009) because learning among groups fosters adaptive capacity to cope with socialecological complexity and to respond to an uncertain future (Tompkins and Adger 2004).…”

Constitutionality: Conditions for Crafting Local Ownership of Institution-Building Processes

“…The approach was inspired by many years of work on the dismantling of well-working institutions for the management of common pool resources by the authors and others (see Rist et al 2006;Acciaioli 2008a;2008b;Geiser and Rist 2009;Haller 2010;, uncovering the top-down nature of many participatory projects in natural resource management and protected areas (see Rist et al 2007;Galvin and Haller 2008;Acciaioli 2009). In this article we seek to move beyond the analysis of such failures in cases that depend upon participation in schemes introduced from outside (e.g., Barron, Diprose, and Woolcock 2011) and subjectivity imposed from above (e.g., Agrawal 2005) to a focus upon local agency and creativity in the construction of novel institutions to deal with environmental issues.…”

Participatory Model Construction and Model Use in Natural Resource Management: a Framework for Reflection

“…The requirements analysis may even reveal that it is better not to construct or use a model to support participatory NRM decision-making. The process design for rural communities by Rist et al (2006), for example, comprises communicative workshops involving a mix of local and external people that deliberately do not follow structured, cognition-oriented methods such as modelling, to avoid that the external people would impose their mode of thought on the local participants.…”