Abstract
In this chapter, the authors, dealing with an uncertain and complex context, defend that socio-ecological literacy is crucial for societal evolution since it contributes to changes in attitudes and behaviors, and, as a consequence, it promotes society transformation. This can be accomplished through Social Labs (SL), carefully designed and professionally facilitated, promoting genuine dialogue. These SL end up operating as privileged learning spaces contributing to socio-ecological literacy citizenship. Through evaluative interviews of the stakeholders involved in the SL created within the MARGov Project, the authors show how the SL created were able to bring to the table angry stakeholders and turn a negative discourse into a positive one, engaging the community in search of joint solutions. As reported by the participants, knowledge was expanded and new knowledge was built during the sessions showing that the multiplicity of learnings does contribute to the promotion of a more resilient and sustainable community, while increasing the socio-ecological literacy of the ones engaged.
TopIntroduction
People have worked together to address and solve common issues since the beginning of civilization. That capacity became more than ever essential in our days, in the densely interconnected and interdependent world we live in.
Since the end of XX century it has become clear that social, technological, environmental, and ecological dynamic complex problems society is facing are impossible to address using “classic” scientific methods (Rittel & Webber, 1973). These “wicked problems” – e.g poverty, climate change, marine litter, deforestation – are intertwingled, integrate incomplete and/or contradictory knowledge, and involve people with different perspectives and world visions. As such, any attempted solution requires mutual learning among the many interested parties, incorporating their multiple viewpoints and ways of thinking (Brown et al., 2010). This new perspective on thinking about and engaging in inquiry is the realm of transdisciplinary (Bernstein, 2015; Nicolescu, 2002).
Most of the challenges to sustainability bear the features associated with ‘wickedness’. The debates about sustainability have become mainstream over the last three decades; along this period, it has become evident that the sustainability goals are context-specific and bounded to be questioned. This made evident the strong political nature – rather than scientific or technical – of the roles of public deliberation and negotiation in regard to the definition of what is to be sustained and of how to get there (Gollagher & Hartz-Karp, 2013; Leach et al., 2010).
The advent and development of this “deliberative turn” (Dryzek, 2000) has brought with it a new wave of collaborative ways of problem solving. It is in this context that collaborative governance evolves as a set of processes and structures of public policy decision making and management. Collaborative governance engages people constructively across the boundaries of public agencies, levels of government, and/or the public, private and civic spheres in order to carry out a public purpose that could not otherwise be accomplished (Emerson et al., 2012).
Furthermore, while creating and supporting the collaborative process, the people engaged in social labs also build collective intelligence (Lévy, 1999; Surowiecki, 2004) what makes these settings real collaborative learning contexts, leading to societal transformation or, at the least, resulting in learning practices that promote active socio-ecological literacy.
The present chapter offers an overview of the conceptual framework behind socio-ecological literacy and the path that connects it to societal transformation towards sustainable development. It brings together a set of concepts widely used but still with limited understanding, such as socio-ecological literacy, lifelong learning and education, transdisciplinarity, sustainability, to make them more explicit and establish a fluid discourse. This will be framed in the context of social learning in natural resources management research, that focuses in the learning outcomes. Using the idea of learning as an outcome of transdisciplinary collaborative processes, and resorting to a case study – MARGov Project – it illustrates how a social lab can be successful in imprinting transformation on the people engaged, altering an initial conflicting picture to a more constructive situation able to deal with reality and to generate joint solutions. This is reflected in the narrative built from interviews of the participants. The multiplicity of knowledges acquired by the people involved along the process fed the individual and collective citizenry literacy and contributed to changes in that community. The case study demonstrates how collaboration can play a key role in increasing socio-ecological literacy and provide the conditions to evolve towards a more sustainable society.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Social Justice: Is a merge of two concepts - redistribution and recognition; as egalitarian redistribution it pursues a more just distribution of resources and goods, and is a matter of political/economic restructuring; as recognition it envisages a more diversity-tolerant world where assimilation to majority or dominant cultural norms is no longer the price of equal respect, and is a matter of status change. Central to both principles are the parity of participation and equality, i.e . allowing all adults in a society to interact with each other as peers (cf. Fraser, 2000 ).
Genuine Dialogue: Is a dialogical process that follow a set of requirements ( e.g , everybody equally informed) where all the parts are heard, different types of knowledges articulated, contributing to the empowerment of the stakeholders (cf. Habermas, 1984 ).
Knowledge Creation: A process with the capacity to generate and disseminate new knowledge and turn it into action (cf. Nonaka et al., 2000 ).
Social Learning: Capacity for collective action, problem solving, conflict mitigation and relationship building though dialogue, debate and experiments (cf. Cundill et al., 2014 ; Ernst, 2019b )
Transdisciplinary Work: Highly participatory mixed methods process that engage actors and agents from multiple disciplines and societal sectors, including those intended to benefit for interventions, to enable the crisscross of disciplinary and sectoral boundaries with the aim to change, remove, or go beyond those borders while integrating perspectives and practices emanating from the process itself (cf. McGregor, 2015 ; Neuhauser, 2018 ).
Intellectual Capital: Knowledge built by a diversity of stakeholders in a collaborative process by sharing, confronting and debate different types of knowledge for joint problem solving (cf. Grimaldi et al., 2013 , Nonaka et al., 2000 ).
Facilitation/Mediation: Are methodologies used in multi-parts, multi-interests contexts to establish a dialogue and group dynamic for discussion and joint decision. Facilitation is used usually when there is no conflict among the parts, while mediation applies when it is necessary to work a conflict among the parts to reach a solution (cf. Cebola et al., 2020 ).
Collective Intelligence: Is a type of shared intelligence generated from the collaboration of a diversity of individuals, constituting the mutual recognition and the enrichment of people (cf. Johnson, 2008 ; Surowiecki, 2004 ).
Social Capital: A generation of relationships with other entities, build partnerships and networks usually a result of a collaborative process (cf. Gruber, 1994 )