Aerial view of oil being burned from the Deepwater Horizon/BP incident, May 19, 2010. U.S Coast Guard photo by Chief Petty Officer John Kepsimeli

A few weeks ago Naomi Klein provided us with a very close-up yet systems-like view of looking at this disaster in her Guardian column – Gulf oil spill: A hole in the world. In this article she takes us into local meetings, and looks at wider policy initiatives. As she says, “the most positive possible outcome of this disaster would be not only an acceleration of renewable energy sources like wind, but a full embrace of the precautionary principle in science. The mirror opposite of Hayward’s “If you knew you could not fail” credo, the precautionary principle holds that “when an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health” we tread carefully, as if failure were possible, even likely.”

The calamity that is the massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico has been at the forefront of world media for almost 90 days now. The death of the 11 oil-rig workers, the loss of countless fish, turtles, birds and other marine life, and the impact on local jobs are all inextricably linked, and yet each is a tragedy in its own right. Clearly there’s a lot of blame to go around for the ongoing disaster in the gulf. As the Grist writers point out in the weeks since the Horizon rig first came unglued, all the principals in this mess have taken turns pointing fingers at one another. They even created a pie chart showing their estimation of “Who’s to blame for the Gulf oil gusher“. However, as Marilyn Paul says in an article in The Systems Thinker a few years ago titled, “Moving from Blame to Accountability,” “Where there is blame, open minds close, inquiry tends to cease, and the desire to understand the whole system diminishes. . . . Blame rarely enhances our understanding of our situation and often hampers effective problem solving.”

Making people and organizations accountable is important. But more importantly we need to take the opportunity to look at the underlying system that led to this crisis and develop long-term solutions that help prevent future crises. This may require us to look hard at our energy dependency, and look again at the risks it poses in terms of environmental damage and global change. Russ Linden reminds us that Paul Romer, a Stanford economist, coined the term “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste” in his blog of the same name. This view encourages us to look beyond the immediate challenge inherent in crises to look for the opportunities. As Linden points out when a crisis arises a number of opportunities that can support a more positive systems change also emerge:

• Resources become available
• Different priorities come into focus
• Rigid rules and regulations suddenly become pliable
• Leaders pay attention and are accessible
• Change, even far-reaching change, is possible

What is important that we involve the right people in this process, and that means involving more than the usual suspects. Solving problems associated with developing more resilient societal systems is not just about changing the behaviour of individual actors, businesses and communities, but about seeking new ways of thinking about systems, neighbours and holistic planning. While individual stakeholders may make the ultimate decisions on-the-ground (e.g. do we use as much petrol or electricity this month), others play an active role in creating the context that enables – or inhibits – constructive change (i.e. what policies will support constructive change here). Consequently, an important part of successful change is about engaging stakeholders in the process of learning and adaptive management and about negotiating how to move forward in a complex world, where we do not have all the information. Seen in this way engaging with the bigger problems are not just the mandate of national and regional agencies and government, others from science, business, and the requisite public interest groups all hold keys that are important to support overall change. Nor is there likely to be one big answer, it will be a case of all these different groups making their own tweaks and adaptations to the way they go about their daily business.

Central to this more collaborative approach are tools for systems thinking and the development of platforms for dialogue and negotiation to occur between and across different stakeholder groups. the Learning for Sustainability page on negotiation and dialog provides a range of resources concerned with improving opportunities and techniques for this active interaction.

In a recent Leverage Point Blog post on this subject, Janice Molloy reflects the more positive move to collaborative reflection and action that is happening saying – “If there’s any bright spot, from what I’ve seen in the media, more and more people seem to be acknowledging our collective role in the larger issue at stake–that of oil dependency. And as systems thinking teaches, when we acknowledge that we are part of the problem, then we can start being part of the solution. … Let’s assume collective responsibility for creating a better future by working to ensure that the current crisis leads to fundamental changes–at all levels.”

More resources on community resilience and systems thinking are available through the Learning for Sustainability portal.

This portal site has been updated on an ongoing basis over the past few months. This newsletter provides a brief introduction to new resources that have been added. In the reading section links are provided to three useful literature reviews, covering partnerships, leadership and participation respectively.

The Learning for Sustainability site - http://learningforsustainability.net – brings together resources that help address the social and capacity building aspects of managing collective interests within complex and adapting systems. 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.

The featured links in this newsletter are drawn from some of the new sections added recently.  Direct links to these papers are provided through the on-line update – http://learningforsustainability.net/newsletters/apr10.php

• “Perspectives on partnership: A literature review” – This paper by Doug Horton, Gordon Prain and Graham Thiele reports on a wide-ranging review of the literature on partnerships and other closely related forms of collaboration. It identifies and analyzes key cross-cutting themes and success factors, highlights gaps in current knowledge, and identifies high-potential areas for further study. <more>
• “Leadership in Sustainable Urban Water Management: An Investigation of the champion phenomenon within Australian water agencies” – This report by André Taylor develops and communicates a suite of management strategies that can be used within water agencies to: create a supportive leadership process at different levels. These include: fostering effective champions at an executive level (‘executive champions’); attracting, recruiting, supervising and developing the leadership abilities of champions at a middle management level (‘project champions’); and encouraging distributed (group-based) leadership. <more>
• “Stakeholder participation for environmental management: A literature review” – This working paper by Mark Reed points to the need to focus on participation as a process. It then identifies a number of best practice features from the literature. Finally, it argues that to overcome many of its limitations, stakeholder participation must be institutionalised, creating organisational cultures that can facilitate processes where goals are negotiated and outcomes are necessarily uncertain. The paper acknowledges that seen in this light, participatory processes may seem very risky, but there is growing evidence that if well designed, these perceived risks may be well worth taking. <more>

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.