Science Education for Civic Participation: Adaptive Learning to Enhance Community Resilience

1. 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 University Dept. of Natural resources 06 April 2006

2. 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? 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. 1 (Gunderson and Holling 2002, Walker et al 2002).

3. 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.

4. Resilience ...the capacity of a system to undergo disturbance and maintain both its existing functions and controls and its capacity for future change. Resilience is determined by: • a system’s ability to buffer or absorb shocks • its capacity for learning and self-organization to adapt to change Holling 1973; Gunderson 2000; Carpenter et al. 2001; Gunderson and Holling 2002

5. Adaptive Cycle

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

7. 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)

8. Adaptive Learning4 What is it? ♦ 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 adaptive co-management— lessons from selected experiences in South and Southeast Asia. MRAG Ltd. London

9. 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?

10. 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.