In recent weeks it seems that attention is being given to the idea that while we have a certain level of understanding of the physical, chemical and biological processes around climate change, in order to change what’s happening, we need to look at the social systems which are contributing.

A few days ago Nature’s Climate Feedback blog talked about the need for more social science in climate change: IHDP: should 90% of climate change research be social science?. It started from the keynote of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP), quoting Hans Joachim Schellnhuber of Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research.

Another recent article in Seed Magazine: The Last Experiment, also argues for more social science to be used in climate change research and development initiatives.

“One needs social science at the absolute center of the strategic decisions being made in this area. It has to be on an equal footing with the natural sciences, with engineering, with economic analyses,” Fischhoff argues. “If it’s at the end, then it’s too late to shape the policies in ways that will have any meaningful impact.” To fix this, Fischhoff envisions an NIH-like social-science corps, a “substantial institution that would provide social-sciences resources for people willing to take these issues seriously.” If legitimate and properly funded, it could finally attract more top scientists, the kind of people who are “more concerned with making this work than publishing another limited disciplinary paper,” as he puts it.

Though it’s too early to tell, the sleeping giant of government funding may be stirring. Social scientists increasingly play a role in projects funded by NOAA, and a major forthcoming National Academies study called “America’s Climate Choices” will be led, in part, by social scientists. A recent report from the National Research Council observed that the US Climate Change Science Program “is hindered by its limited research into the social sciences,” as a press release mildly put it, “…and the separation of natural and social sciences research.” Social science spending has never risen above 3 percent of the program’s budget.

The BBC has recently launched a website – ‘Bloom’ – an interactive site for those who want to tackle climate change but are not sure how to go about it. In addition to providing news and blog commentary, the site handpicks individual actions for the viewer, and allows comparisons between these and other actions by how much carbon dioxide they save, how cheap they are, and how easy other ‘bloomers’ have found them. Each feature has hard facts, expert opinion and topical debate to provide a sense of how much difference particular actions can really make.

With everyone leading different lives, Bloom helps individuals to pick the actions that work for them… ‘pick a seed, plant it to represent your action, and watch your flowers bloom’!

EcoTrust’s web magazine People and Place has an interesting article by Peter and Trudy Johnson-Lenz in which they propose Six Habits of Highly Resilient Organizations:

1. Resilient organizations actively attend to their environments.
2. Resilient organizations prepare themselves and their employees for disruptions.
3. Resilient organizations build in flexibility.
4. Resilient organizations strengthen and extend their communications networks – internally and externally.
5. Resilient organizations encourage innovation and experimentation.
6. Resilient organizations cultivate a culture with clearly shared purpose and values.

As the authors write:

Most companies live fast and die young. A study in 1983 by Royal Dutch/Shell found only 40 corporations over 100 years old. In contrast, they found that one-third of the Fortune 500s from 1970 were, at that time, already gone.

What differentiates success and failure, resilience and collapse? The Royal Dutch/Shell study emphasizes shared purpose and values, tolerance of new ideas, financial reserves, and situational awareness.

More recently, Ceridian Corporation collected best thinking and strategies to publish an executive briefing on organizational resilience. They highlighted the paradox that successful, resilient organizations are those that are able to respond to two conflicting imperatives:

• managing for performance and growth, which requires consistency, efficiency, eliminating waste, and maximizing short-term results
• managing for adaptation, which requires foresight, innovation, experimentation, and improvisation, with an eye on long-term benefits

Most organizations pay great attention to the first imperative but little to the second. Start-ups often excel at improvisation and innovation but founder on the shoals of consistent performance and efficiency. About half of all new companies fail during their first five years.

Each mode requires a different skill set and organizational design. Moving nimbly between them is a tricky dynamic balancing act. Disruptions can come from anywhere – from within, from competitors, infrastructure or supply chain crises, or from human or natural disasters. The financial crisis has riveted current attention, but it’s just one of many disruptions organizations must cope with daily. Planning for disruption means shifting from “just-in-time” production and efficiency to “just-in-case” resilience.

The Learning for Sustainability (LfS) web portal brings together resources that help address the social and capacity building aspects of managing collective interests. The site highlights the wide range of social skills and processes that are needed to support constructive collaboration, and indicates how these skills and processes can be interwoven to achieve more integrated and effective outcomes. This site brings links to several hundred annotated on-line resources from different sectors and geographic areas together in one easy to access site. This portal has been substantially revised and updated over the past few months. This newsletter provides a brief introduction to new links that have been added, and more detail is provided through the on-line update available at http://learningforsustainability.net/newsletters/feb09.php

New portal content

A new section on governance has now been developed. This is accessible directly off the front page menu system, and provides managers, policy makers and others with links to resources that look at inclusive governance, adaptation and adaptive management. Other new sections link to resources that support thinking and practice around managing complex systems, community resilience, and participation. A central guides, tools and checklists section provides practical guidance to help readers address issues involved in managing multi-stakeholder processes. Lessons are drawn from different sectors including catchments and watersheds, natural resources, HIV/AIDS, climate change, and disasters. Other site sections provide links to best and emerging practice in specific areas including social learning, network building and mapping, dialogue, knowledge management, and evaluation. Research links cover action research, systems thinking, participation, integration and interdisciplinarity. One page lists on-line resources for both post-graduate research students and their supervisors.

Recent research papers and reports

The featured links in this newsletter are drawn from some of the new sections added recently. As the LfS pages show there is a wealth of really good material available - so this section is is by no means intended as an award list, it just lists a selection of recently published material that you may not have already come across. Direct links to these papers are provided through the on-line update – http://learningforsustainability.net/newsletters/feb09.php

• “Managing in an age of complexity” – This web paper by Jean Boulton reviews thinking around complex systems which suggests predictability is the exception rather than the norm  <more>
• “Achieving water conservation: Strategies for good governance” -  This policy report by Karen Bakker and Kathryn Furlong summarizes lessons learned about the links between “good governance” and water conservation, and explores how different governance models can both constrain and enable water conservation <more>
• “Stakeholder participation for environmental managment: A literature review” – This paper by Mark Reed points to the need to replace a “tool-kit” approach, which emphasises selecting the relevant tools for the job, with an approach that emphasises participation as a process <more>
• “Transdisciplinary research (TDR) and sustainability” – This report by Karen Cronin looks at the emergence of transdisciplinary research, including theoretical and practical developments internationally and in New Zealand, and its potential to contribute to sustainability outcomes <more>
• “Building Resilience in Rural Communities: Toolkit” – This new Queensland-developed toolkit outlines 11 resilience concepts found to be pivotal in enhancing individual and community resilience <more>

The UN University (UNU) “World 2.0” blog has been awarded the prize for the best designed site by the world’s largest Internet blog competition. The website was launched in July 2008, and features articles written by the UNU academic faculty, as well as other contributors, and brief video stories from around the world, exploring the relationship between climate change, energy and food security.

The Tokyo-based University’s “World 2.0” blog, launched in July, won the Weblog Awards best design category after close to one million people cast votes in 48 categories over seven days of polling. The site is built on the open source platform, Wordpress, and all content is licensed under Creative Commons. Photos on the web magazine are provided by the Flickr community, and the site’s videos are accessible via YouTube and Vimeo.

The winner of the  Development Gateway Foundation photo competition was taken by Sandipan Majumdar from India. His photo shown here has a man selling pottery in a rural area of the state of Rajasthan, a state which has been a major travel destination for tourists seeking to get a flavor of our traditional rural ethos. As Sandipan says, “In this village named Khuri, most of the households are engaged in pottery making as their sole means of livelihood. I was surprised to find that through government initiatives, local potters have formed formal and info rmal cooperative societies to undertake collective marketing and get better deals for their wares. Staying with these people for a few days made me realize that we photographers often tend to get engrossed in our artistic zeal and miss the “human” side of the story, a story about a group of illiterate men and women who have dared to dream of self help as a means of raising their families and preserving a dying art.” His winning photo can be viewed here.

This picture by Prashant Bhardwaj won the Development Gateway Foundation photo competition last year. It is from a handwriting competition held in one of the centers where they teach children who once used to work as child labor in the brass industry in the city. Prashant Bhardwajtalks more about this photo, explaining why he took it and the hope that it stands for,  on the Foundation’s photo webpage.

This year’s photo competition just opened today, and the winner will receive a $1000 prize. The competition organizers are looking for compelling photographs of socio-economic development in developing countries. Four types of photographs will be accepted. 1) The images may show information and communications technologies helping ordinary people. 2) The images may show people making something, selling wares, working in a field, constructing a building or type of infrastructure, or acquiring knowledge. 3) The images could be abstract images representing hope, the future, or capacity building. 4) The photographs may also include images of original artwork from a developing country.

Each entry must include a written statement explaining how that image is representative of development. Images will be judged on technical excellence, composition, overall impact, and artistic merit.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. The picture cloud above uses the words in this ’sparks for change’ blog page.

The We Are Media Project is bringing together people who are interested in learning and teaching about how social media strategies and tools can enable nonprofit organizations to create, compile, and distribute their stories and change the world. This project builds on the growing reasons for using social media that are set out in Marta Kagan’s punchy presentation below.

Over the next six months the We Are Media Project will develop a “Social Media Starter Kit for Nonprofits”. The project is being supported by NTEN and is being facilitated by Beth Kanter.

This is an open project so if you are beginning to get interested in social media for your nonprofit – or business – visit the We Are Media Project and have a look at what is being developed, or even share your thoughts and be part of the project.

Its rather punchy title aside, if you are wondering what all the hype about social media is then the skideshow below is very informative. Marta Kagan has developed a slick and professional presentation, and provides an excellent introductory snapshot of social media statistics that characterize contemporary Internet use. For example, 73% of on-line active users have read a blog, and 39% subscribe to an RSS feed. 57% have joined a social network site. Combine this with the fact that only 14% of people trust adverts while 78% trust word of mouth and you begin to see the potential of social media and the growing networks they support to get your message across.

| View | Upload your own

Along the way Marta reminds us that this is not about the Internet, but about people.

“The new communication model is a dialogue … which means it’s transparent, inclusive, authentic, vibrant, and consumer-driven.”

According to Slideshare, this presentation has had more than 20,000 views in the past week, and more than 280 embeds … which is impressive, and makes this well worth having a look through. Besides which, it shows us what we can aspire to with powerpoint presentations!