Science Education for Civic Participation: Adaptive Learning

to Enhance Community Resilience

Exploring a role for SECP in community resilience building, and in community responses to

catastrophe in urban areas.

Keith G. Tidball, Cornell UniversityDept. of Natural resources

06 April 2006

Understanding the loss, creation, and maintenance of resilience through the process of co-discovery is at

the heart of sustainability1.

What is meant by “resilience?” “co-discovery” and “Adaptive Learning” What is the role or application for SECP?

1 (Gunderson and Holling 2002, Walker et al 2002).

SECP as adaptive learning provides a model to explore how individual creativity, social memory, and institutions of knowledge are interconnected. How learning, especially science learning, leads to building adaptive capacity for increasing the “resilience” of social-ecological systems is the question explored in the proposed paper/chapter.

Background2

Linkages between ecological and social systems broadly recognized.

Theories of how to confront and adaptively manage uncertainty in complex systems influence natural resource management.

Change and surprise are inherent properties of complex systems.

Timing and resilience determine the outcomes of cycles.

2 Adapted from Clark, D. (in prep.) Adaptive Cycles and the Resilience of the Parks Canada Agency. For submission to Conservation Ecology.

Resilience

Resilience is determined by: a system’s ability to buffer or absorb

shocks its capacity for learning and self-

organization to adapt to change

...the capacity of a system to undergo disturbance and maintain both its existing functions and controls and its capacity for future change.

Holling 1973; Gunderson 2000; Carpenter et al. 2001; Gunderson and Holling 2002

Adaptive Cycle

Panarchies

Adaptive cycles exist in connected, nested hierarchies- termed “panarchies”- across scales of time and space

Resilience Management3

Learning to live with change and uncertainty Nurturing diversity for reorganization and

renewal Combining different types of knowledge for

learning Creating opportunity for self-organization

HOW MIGHT SECP CONTRIBUTE ?

3 Berkes et al. (2003); Folke et al. (2003)

Adaptive Learning4

♦ learning a three stage process♦ need to understand both the social and technical aspects of systems♦ Learning must be demand-led and appropriate

4 Garaway, C.J. and Arthur, R.I. 2004. Adaptive learning: a practical framework for the implementation of adaptiveco-management— lessons from selected experiences in South and Southeast Asia. MRAG Ltd. London

What is it?

SECP as Adaptive Learning? Can SECP be thought of as a kind of “adaptive learning,”

a way to build knowledge? Rather than dealing with learning as a purely individual or

a collective phenomenon, can I situate learning within the social-ecological system and consider it as a systems issue?

If adaptive learning provides a model to explore how individual creativity, social memory, and institutions of knowledge are interconnected, how might SECP as adaptive learning lead to building adaptive capacity for increasing the “resilience” of social-ecological systems?

Conclusion

SECP as adaptive learning provides a model to explore how individual creativity, social memory, and institutions of knowledge are interconnected. How learning, especially science learning, leads to building adaptive capacity for increasing the “resilience” of social-ecological systems (Walker et al. 2002) is the question explored in the proposed paper.