Sustainability Learning in Natural Resource Use and Management

By J. Tàbara, C. Pahl‐Wostl. 2007

229 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We contribute to the normative discussion on sustainability learning and provide a theoretical integrative framework intended to underlie the main components and interrelations of what learning is required for social learning to become sustainability learning. We demonstrate how this framework has been operationalized in a participatory modeling interface to support processes of natural resource integrated assessment and management. The key modeling components of our view are: structure (S), energy and resources (E), information and knowledge (I), social-ecological change (C), and the size, thresholds, and connections of different social-ecological systems. Our approach attempts to overcome many of the cultural dualisms that exist in the way social and ecological systems are perceived and affect many of the most common definitions of sustainability. Our approach also emphasizes the issue of limits within a total socialecological system and takes a multiscale, agent-based perspective. Sustainability learning is different from social learning insofar as not all of the outcomes of social learning processes necessarily improve what we consider as essential for the long-term sustainability of social-ecological systems, namely, the co-adaptive systemic capacity of agents to anticipate and deal with the unintended, undesired, and irreversible negative effects of development. Hence, the main difference of sustainability learning from social learning is the content of what is learned and the criteria used to assess such content; these are necessarily related to increasing the capacity of agents to manage, in an integrative and organic way, the total social–ecological system of which they form a part. The concept of sustainability learning and the SEIC social-ecological framework can be useful to assess and communicate the effectiveness of multiple agents to halt or reverse the destructive trends affecting the life-support systems upon which all humans depend.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Management Science and Operations Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4c4bc8b0feded69cbad2703b48dbd2ef41bdcea8

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In Global and Planetary Change

In Management Science and Operations Research

Citations in the corpus

Levers and leverage points for pathways to sustainability (2020, background): “…social literatures who emphasize that the needed learning is also social learning towards sustainability—learning about ourselves, our institutions and our processes in the context of complexity and ecological limits (Chapman, LaValle, Furey, & Chan, 2017; Lee, 1994; Tábara & Pahl-Wostl, 2007).”
What is social learning (2010, background): “…systems; social learning This is a response to Davidson-Hunt and Berkes 2003, Pahl-Wostl 2006, Ison and Watson 2007, Mostert et al. 2007, Pahl-Wostl et al. 2007a,b, 2008, Stevaert and Ollivier 2007, Tàbara and Pahl-Wostl 2007, Borowski et al. 2008, Fernandez-Gimenez et al. 2008, Kuper et al. 2009”
Learning to Love the Landscapes of Carbon-Neutrality (2010, background): “…important, therefore, that attention turns to the democratisation of landscape choices through the use of increasingly well tested practices such as deliberative mapping and social/ sustainability learning (e.g. Burgess et al, 2007, Petts, 2007, Blackmore et al, 2007, Tàbara and Pahl-Wostl, 2007).”
Principal sustainability components: empirical analysis of synergies between the three pillars of sustainability (2012, background): “Not all individual and social learning processes improve the resilience of human–environment systems and the ‘co-adaptive systemic capacity of agents to anticipate and deal with the unintended, undesired, and irreversible negative effects of development’ (Tàbara and Pahl-Wostl 2007: 1).”