In complex, real-world settings, progress often depends on people learning together. This post explores what social learning looks like in practice, and why creating space for reflection, dialogue, and shared understanding is key to working across difference and uncertainty.
When people face complex challenges – whether in sustainability transitions, public health, urban development, or freshwater management – there is often no single answer or fixed path forward. Instead, progress depends on people learning their way into the problem together.
That’s where social learning comes in. While the term might sound abstract, the idea is very practical: it’s about creating space for shared reflection, deeper dialogue, and more connected action. It’s about how people build understanding and trust as they respond to uncertainty, difference, and change. And it’s something many of us are already doing, often without naming it as such.
The photo above captures this spirit. In the midst of a fast-moving public space, three people have paused to talk. It’s a reminder that social learning can happen wherever people choose to slow down, reflect, and make sense together.
This post explores what social learning looks like in practice. It brings together updated insights and links to the new Social Learning resource hub here on the Learning for Sustainability website.
What is social learning?
Social learning is about people learning with and from one another as they work through shared challenges. It is not simply about transferring knowledge, running a workshop, or bringing people together once. It is a longer process of dialogue, reflection, experimentation, and adjustment.
In complex settings, this matters because no one person or organisation holds the whole picture. Different actors bring different knowledge, responsibilities, values, and forms of experience. Social learning creates the conditions for those perspectives to be shared, tested, and connected over time.
It is both a process and an outcome. We see it in the conversations, questions, relationships, and experiments that happen along the way. We also see it later, when people develop a stronger shared understanding, build trust, shift how they work, or begin to act together in ways that were not possible before.
This does not mean everyone needs to agree. Often, the value of social learning lies in helping people stay with uncertainty, difference, and tension long enough to make better sense of what is happening and what might be tried next.
Key elements of social learning in practice
On the Social Learning hub page, I have grouped the enabling conditions for social learning into seven connected strands. These are not steps in a sequence. In practice, they tend to overlap and reinforce one another.
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Systems thinking and practice
Systems thinking helps people see connections, patterns, feedback loops, and wider consequences. It supports shared understanding of the situation, rather than focusing only on isolated issues or short-term fixes. - Complexity-aware thinking and practice
Complexity-aware approaches help groups work with uncertainty, emergence, and change. They support learning as action unfolds, especially where outcomes cannot be fully predicted in advance.. -
Building networks for collaboration
Social learning depends on relationships. Networks, communities of practice, partnerships, and learning groups create the conditions for people to stay connected, build trust, and keep learning together over time. -
Deliberation and dialogue
Dialogue helps people work across different values, roles, and forms of knowledge. Well-facilitated deliberation creates space for listening, questioning, disagreement, and shared sense-making. -
Co-producing knowledge and understanding
Complex challenges often need different kinds of knowledge to be brought together. Participatory mapping, conceptual modelling, and co-production approaches can help people connect science, practice, local knowledge, and lived experience. -
Monitoring, evaluation & learning (MEL)
MEL can support social learning when it is used to guide reflection, not just report results. It helps groups notice what is changing, ask better questions, and adapt their work as conditions shift. -
Creating enabling environments
Social learning also depends on the wider conditions around the work. This includes time, trust, capacity, leadership, psychological safety, and organisational cultures that make reflection and adaptation possible.
Together, these strands help turn social learning from a broad idea into something more practical. They point to the kinds of relationships, processes, tools, and conditions that support people to learn their way through complex challenges together. The Social Learning hub brings these strands together with links to related resources, tools, and examples.
Why does this matter?
In practice, social learning offers a way to bring people together who might otherwise stay in separate silos. It helps them develop shared language and insight, navigate tension, and move from dialogue to coordinated action. This is especially valuable in settings where power is distributed, change is emergent, and different forms of knowledge need to be respected.
In one freshwater planning initiative, community members and agency staff used regular reflection sessions to track what they were learning. And this is not just about water quality, but also about each other’s values and roles. Over time, this helped shift both relationships and decision-making processes.
Over the years, I have seen how this approach can strengthen collective action and build adaptive capacity. In initiatives like the Living Water partnership and other place-based collaborations, social learning has supported teams to hold the complexity of what is unfolding, without rushing to premature certainty.
And crucially, it is not about consensus for its own sake. Effective social learning makes room for uncertainty, difference, and even conflict, but in ways that support respectful engagement and practical progress.
Continuing the journey
Social learning is a powerful idea, but it is not a fixed model. It draws on a wide and evolving field, including systems thinking, organisational learning, co-design, and participatory evaluation. If you are working in complex, multi-actor settings, I hope the Social Learning hub offers useful framings and tools.
For many of us working in complex, systems-facing spaces, social learning is already part of how we work — even if we don’t always name it that way. What matters is not whether we adopt a new label, but whether we create the conditions that allow people to learn, adapt, and act collectively. That is the real value of social learning — and why it deserves more attention as a practical, relational, and deeply human part of systems change.
If these ideas resonate, I’d love to hear how social learning is showing up in your own work. You can explore more tools and examples via the Social Learning hub, or visit the companion page Social learning in practice, which curates examples, frameworks, and stories from the field. I also welcome any reflections or suggestions that might enrich this resource further.
[* Photo credit: 123RF / Rawpixel.com]
This post builds on an earlier version I shared in 2017, which introduced some of these same ideas. That original post remains available here as a snapshot of where this thinking began.
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