Social Learning and Water Resources Management

By C. Pahl‐Wostl, M. Craps, Art Dewulf, E. Mostert, D. Tábara, Tharsi Taillieu. 2007

1,277 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Natural resources management in general, and water resources management in particular, are currently undergoing a major paradigm shift. Management practices have largely been developed and implemented by experts using technical means based on designing systems that can be predicted and controlled. In recent years, stakeholder involvement has gained increasing importance. Collaborative governance is considered to be more appropriate for integrated and adaptive management regimes needed to cope with the complexity of social-ecological systems. The paper presents a concept for social learning and collaborative governance developed in the European project HarmoniCOP (Harmonizing COllaborative Planning). The concept is rooted in the more interpretive strands of the social sciences emphasizing the context dependence of knowledge. The role of frames and boundary management in processes of learning at different levels and time scales is investigated. The foundation of social learning as investigated in the HarmoniCOP project is multiparty collaboration processes that are perceived to be the nuclei of learning processes. Such processes take place in networks or “communities of practice” and are influenced by the governance structure in which they are embedded. Requirements for social learning include institutional settings that guarantee some degree of stability and certainty without being rigid and inflexible. Our analyses, which are based on conceptual considerations and empirical insights, suggest that the development of such institutional settings involves continued processes of social learning. In these processes, stakeholders at different scales are connected in flexible networks that allow them to develop the capacity and trust they need to collaborate in a wide range of formal and informal relationships ranging from formal legal structures and contracts to informal, voluntary agreements.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Ocean Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/122087a8aea4c8180f31533f652b7167bc8cab0f

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In Global and Planetary Change

In Ocean Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Self-Organized Governance Networks for Ecosystem Management: Who Is Accountable? (2011, background): “…have focused on the enhanced potential of collaboration in governance networks for social learning, innovative responses, and adaptive governance of the complex interactions in social-ecological systems (Schusler et al. 2003, Tippett et al. 2005, Lebel et al. 2006, Pahl-Wostl et al. 2007).”
Evolution of co-management: role of knowledge generation, bridging organizations and social learning. (2009, background): “, 2005) and river basin comanagement in Europe (Pahl-Wostl and Hare, 2004; Pahl-Wostl et al., 2007).”
Public participation for sustainability and social learning: Concepts and lessons from three case studies in Europe (2010, background): “…where the actors involved are continuously learning from each other and where social learning becomes a key governanceprocess (Board on Sustainable Development, National Research Council, 1999; Parson and Clark, 1995; The Social Learning Group, 2001; Folke et al., 2005; Pahl-Wostl et al., 2007b).”
Maturing the New Water Management Paradigm: Progressing from Aspiration to Practice (2011, background): “As highlighted by Pahl-Wostl et al. (2007) processes of reframing and social learning are most effective in shared experiences and when supported by relational practices (e.g. role playing games, group model building).”
The Adaptive Capacity Wheel: a method to assess the inherent characteristics of institutions to enable the adaptive capacity of society (2010, background): “…learning (Wenger, 1998), learning capacity and the ability to experiment (Walker et al., 2002) while maintaining all intrinsic critical functions and feedback mechanisms (Olsson et al., 2004) and accommodating perturbations (Adger, 2003) are integral to adaptive capacity (Pahl-Wostl et al., 2007).”
The distribution of roles and functions for upscaling and outscaling innovations in agricultural innovation systems (2013, background): “During the projects people will interact with each other, change their ideas and develop new ideas through different forms of social learning (Jakku and Thorburn, 2010; Pahl-Wostl et al., 2007).”
What is social learning (2010, background): “…existing attempts to assess social learning fail to disentangle the effects of an intervention from other mechanisms through which wider learning may have occurred (for example, Pahl-Wostl 2006, Pahl-Wostl et al. 2007a,b, Fernandez-Gimenez et al. 2008, Pahl-Wostl et al. 2008, Kuper et al. 2009).”
Toward a Relational Concept of Uncertainty: about Knowing Too Little, Knowing Too Differently, and Accepting Not to Know (2008, background): “In this way, it is possible to create the opportunity to discover more innovative and more integrative actions than the ones that are usually considered within a single view on the problem (Duijn et al. 2003, Pahl-Wostl et al. 2007).”
Transformational change: governance interventions for climate change adaptation from a continuous change perspective (2017, background): “…recognise that transformational change also requires innovative governing strategies and the development of new governance intervention repertoires (Pahl-Wostl et al. 2007; Pelling 2010; Berkhout, Hertin, and Gann 2006; Kates, Travis, and Wilbanks 2012; Armitage, Marschke, and Plummer 2008; Wise…”