A social learning and transition perspective on a climate change project in South Africa

Highlights

• We used the prescriptive framework of transition arena to assess factors conducive to a transition.

• The transdisciplinary project design was conducive to the buy-in from the agricultural sector.

• The concept of social learning was useful in analyzing if capacity, commitment, and momentum were created.

• Important factors for learning included motivation, trust, sufficient time, and the right timing.

• The continuous involvement of governmental actors was crucial to creating project ownership.

Abstract

The agricultural sector of the Western Cape is highly affected by climate change and thus requires fundamental change to move to a more resilient path. We analyze the development of a climate change plan to obtain a better understanding of what is needed to make such a strategic intervention meaningful in terms facilitating a sustainability transition. We use the concept of transition arena to understand how group composition and processes facilitated or hindered structural change, and apply social learning theory to uncover learning processes and outcomes for whether capacity and momentum for moving towards a more climate resilient sector were created. Commitment on the part of project members created trust in the project and vice versa, while the ongoing involvement of governmental actors was key for creating capacities and commitment for change. The limited participation of niche actors may have hampered the ability to identify more innovative development pathways.

Introduction

Given the projected impact of climate change on some regions and the scale of biophysical and social vulnerability, proactive responses that can facilitate fundamental, large-scale transformations are needed to achieve greater climate resilience. We understand climate resilience as encompassing proactive adaptation as well as measures intended to mitigate the impact of climate change, which has also been described as climate compatible development (Mitchell and Maxwell, 2010). In the context of this paper, we refer to this type of large-scale transformation as a sustainability transition. Grin et al. (2010, p.1) define a sustainability transition as “a radical transformation towards a sustainable society as a response to a number of persistent problems confronting contemporary modern societies.” Such transformation involves “fundamental changes in structural, functional, relational, and cognitive aspects of socio-technical-ecological systems that lead to new patterns of interactions and outcomes" (Patterson et al., 2016, p. 2). Originally, the term “sustainability transition” was defined within transition studies as referring to “long-term, multi-dimensional, and fundamental transformation processes through which established socio-technical systems shift to more sustainable modes of production and consumption” (Markard et al., 2012, p. 956). However, in the context of this paper, we go beyond the notion of sustainable modes of production and consumption, as our analysis is concerned with fundamental change in a regional system (i.e., the agricultural sector of a specific geographic region). Such a system is better understood as a complex socio-technical-ecological system whose main purpose goes beyond sustainable modes of production and consumption. Thus, the emphasis is shifted on advancing human society based on the underlying normative of “living within the planetary boundaries” (Rockström et al., 2009), and of addressing the root causes of social vulnerability (e.g., Pelling et al., 2015).

In the field of climate change adaptation, the need for large-scale transformation is ubiquitous but remains poorly understood. In our view, strategic large-scale interventions aimed at increasing climate resilience (e.g., the development of a sectoral climate change plan) could (and perhaps should) deliberately seek to make meaningful contributions to sustainability transition efforts. Strategic large-scale interventions can do so by linking top-down and bottom-up processes through iterative learning processes and thus create opportunities for the upscaling of innovative and more sustainable alternative practices and processes. Furthermore, such interventions can provide new strategic directions and have the potential to facilitate the changing of institutional structures, decision-making processes, and practices. This paper aims to obtain a better understanding of how the learning that occurs during strategic large-scale interventions aimed at building climate resilience can make a meaningful contribution to a sustainability transition. To this end, we reflect upon the development of a climate change plan (consisting of a response framework and an implementation plan) for the agricultural sector in South Africa’s Western Cape Province through a transdisciplinary research project called SmartAgri. SmartAgri attempted to consolidate the efforts that already existed in the province's agricultural sector and to facilitate both knowledge integration and concerted action that can steer the sector onto a more climate resilient path.

It has been argued that learning is crucial for sustainability transitions because it may lead to the necessary reflexivity and an enhanced potential for scaling up innovations for developing robust and contextualized alternative development pathways (Patterson et al., 2016; Schäpke et al., 2017). While learning is important in various ways for sustainability transitions, it remains weakly conceptualized and elaborated in transition research (van de Kerkhof and Wieczorek, 2005; van Mierlo et al., 2010; Van Mierlo and Beers, 2018). In this paper, we apply social learning theory from the natural resources management literature (e.g., Pahl-Wostl et al., 2007; Muro and Jeffrey, 2008; Reed et al., 2010) to analyze the learning that took place during the SmartAgri project. The social learning literature has many similarities with transition literature (e.g., the importance of bringing together people from different backgrounds and perspectives to restructure problems and develop new ideas) and lends itself well to analyzing aspects of the learning that occurs in transitions. However, even though social learning is mentioned in many transition studies, social learning theory is rarely applied for analysis (Van Mierlo and Beers, 2018). Recent exceptions include a sustainability transition analysis that linked social learning to the concepts of empowerment and social capital (Schäpke et al., 2017), studies associating the communication processes in interaction spaces or niches with the impacts (Van Mierlo et al., 2010; Beers et al., 2016), a framework for creating social learning situations (Bos et al., 2013), and a combination of social learning with Senge’s field of change concept that explicated the importance of innovation projects learning about their environments (Beers et al., 2014). These examples demonstrate that social learning can be employed to analyze the learning that occurs in different phases of a transition. Van Mierlo and Beers (2018) see the main value of using social learning theory in transition research as being the specification of learning itself. We exploit this potential for specification and the rich body of literature on social learning to analyze the learning that occurred among the members of the core SmartAgri team with the intention to determine whether this learning contributed to building capacity and momentum for moving towards a sustainability transition.

Social learning in natural resources management focuses on multi-actor processes wherein mutual interdependencies exist and collective or concerted action¹ is desired (e.g., Schusler et al., 2003). Hence, the focus is on overcoming conflict and on the integration of diverse perspectives. This is in contrast with transition studies, where divergent perspectives are seen as having the potential to develop multiple pathways towards sustainability transitions (Van Mierlo and Beers, 2018). Moreover, social learning theory does not suffice when determining whether fundamental change has been achieved or was intended. As we are interested in the question of whether SmartAgri lived up to the potential for facilitating structural change (i.e., steering a sustainability transition in the agricultural sector), we complement our analysis of learning with insights from transition management literature and examine the project from both perspectives. To this end, we use the concept of a transition arena (Loorbach, 2007) as an analytical lens. While SmartAgri was not intended as a transition arena, it is similar to such an arena in that it was a strategic intervention with the potential to promote large-scale structural change. The concept of the transition arena provides a prescriptive framework how to design a project setting so that it can promote a sustainability transition, and therefore, provides a set of criteria from which a strategic intervention can be evaluated. Applying social learning theory allows us to examine the learning in this strategic intervention to better understand how group processes develop new substance, influence regime actors, create trust and commitment or fail to do so. In summary, combining the transition arena concept with social learning theory allows us to achieve our purpose by determining a) whether factors that are deemed conducive for facilitating structural change apply to our case and b) whether and how the learning processes led to the capacity, momentum and commitment required to take the developed plan further and achieve a meaningful contribution to moving towards a sustainability transition.

The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: In Section 2, we elaborate on the theoretical foundation of this research by discussing sustainability transitions in a regional system and by describing the concepts of the transition arena and social learning, including their application in this paper. In Section 3, we describe our case study and the methods used. In Section 4, we present the results of our analysis. We engage in a discussion of whether the learning that occurred during the SmartAgri project led to a meaningful contribution towards a sustainability transition in Section 5. We end by presenting our conclusions and by identifying potential avenues for future research.