Sustainable Catchment Managing in a Climate Changing World: New Integrative Modalities for Connecting Policy Makers, Scientists and Other Stakeholders

This paper characterises some of the main issues confronting water-catchment managing in a climate-changing world and addresses wide-spread concerns about the lack of connectivity between science, policy making and implementation. The paper’s arguments are ‘framed’ within a paradigm of systemic and adaptive governing, regulating, planning and managing understood as a nested systemic hierarchy. It is argued that climate change adaptation is best understood as a coevolutionary dynamic, principally, but not exclusively between human beings and the biophysical world. Two forms of ‘knowledge brokerage’ based on mode 1 (knowledge) and mode 2 (knowing) are distinguished with practical implications. Drawing on extensive research by the authors, eight modalities for enacting ‘knowledge brokerage’ are introduced. The conditions for or against success in employing these modalities are described. Consistent with the views of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 4th Report 2007, it is argued that water managing is a paradigmatic domain for making climate change adaptation ‘real’ and a systemic issue of global concern at the core of sustainable development.

[1]  Ray Ison,et al.  Appreciating Institutional Complexity in Water Governance Dynamics: A Case from the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia , 2011 .

[2]  R. Ison,et al.  Listening, interpretative cycles and dialogue: process design for collaborative research and development , 1998 .

[3]  C. Pahl-Wostl,et al.  Social Learning and Water Resources Management , 2007 .

[4]  C. Blackmore.  Social learning systems and communities of practice , 2010 .

[5]  Ray Ison,et al.  Methodological challenges of trans-disciplinary research: some systemic reflections , 2008 .

[6]  R. Bawden.  THE COMMUNITY CHALLENGE: THE LEARNING RESPONSE , 2010 .

[7]  Anne Larigauderie,et al.  The Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Science-Policy Interface , 2011, Science.

[8]  C. Dickens,et al.  Integrated Catchment Value Systems , 2009 .

[9]  Etienne Wenger,et al.  Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity , 1998 .

[10]  J. Phillipson,et al.  Common Knowledge? An Exploration of Knowledge Transfer , 2007 .

[11]  H. Bradbury,et al.  Handbook of action research : participative inquiry and practice , 2001 .

[12]  Claudia Pahl-Wostl,et al.  Social Learning in Public Participation in River Basin Management - Early findings from HarmoniCOP European Case Studies , 2005 .

[13]  A knowledge exchange system: Putting innovation to work , 2004 .

[14]  Nadarajah Sriskandarajah,et al.  From sustainable to systemic development: an inquiry into transformations in discourse and praxis , 2008 .

[15]  Pier Paolo Roggero,et al.  The SLIM (Social learning for the integrated management and sustainable use of water at catchment scale) Final Report , 2004 .

[16]  C. Allan.  Exploring Natural Resource Management with Metaphor Analysis , 2007 .

[17]  Ulrike Felt,et al.  Taking European Knowledge Society Seriously , 2009 .

[18]  Charles François,et al.  International Encyclopedia Of Systems And Cybernetics , 2004 .

[19]  R. Ison,et al.  Metaphors for Reflecting on Research Practice: Researching with People , 2003 .

[20]  D. Schoen,et al.  The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action , 1985 .

[21]  Ray Ison,et al.  Editorial: Living with environmental change: adaptation as social learning , 2009 .

[22]  N. Röling,et al.  Facilitating Sustainable Agriculture: Participatory Learning and Adaptive Management in Times of Environmental Uncertainty , 1999 .

[23]  C. Folke,et al.  Enhancing the Fit through Adaptive Co-management: Creating and Maintaining Bridging Functions for Matching Scales in the Kristianstads Vattenrike Biosphere Reserve, Sweden , 2007 .

[24]  Donald A. Schön.  The reflective practitioner : how professionals think in action , 1986 .

[25]  Raymond L. Ison,et al.  Systems Practice: How to Act in a Climate-Change World , 2010 .

[26]  J. Voss,et al.  Reflexive governance for sustainable development , 2006 .

[27]  H. Rittel,et al.  Dilemmas in a general theory of planning , 1973 .

[28]  Pier Paolo Roggero,et al.  Combining social learning with agro-ecological research practice for more effective management of nitrate pollution , 2007 .

[29]  R. Ison.  Reprising “wicked problems”: social learning, climate change adaptation and the sustainable management of water , 2008 .

[30]  J. Jiggins,et al.  Social learning for the integrated management and sustainable use of water at catchment scale , 2004 .

[31]  Stephen Dovers,et al.  Managing water for Australia: the social and institutional challenges , 2007 .

[32]  Lars Otto Naess,et al.  Questioning Complacency: Climate Change Impacts, Vulnerability, and Adaptation in Norway , 2006, Ambio.

[33]  Pim Martens,et al.  Governance for sustainable development: a framework , 2008 .

[34]  David Russell,et al.  The worlds we create: designing learning systems for the underworld of extension practice , 2011 .

[35]  L. Kerkhoff.  Integrated research: Concepts of connection in environmental science and policy , 2005 .

[36]  Donald A. Schön,et al.  Frame Reflection: Toward The Resolution Of Intractable Policy Controversies , 1994 .

[37]  Claudia Pahl-Wostl,et al.  Requirements for Adaptive Water Management , 2008 .

[38]  R. Ison.  Systems thinking and practice for action research , 2008 .

[39]  Frederick L. Kirschenmann,et al.  Facilitating Sustainable Agriculture. , 2001 .

[40]  J. Jiggins,et al.  Governance of complex environmental situations through social learning: a synthesis of SLIM's lessons for research, policy and practice , 2007 .

[41]  D. Schoen.  The Reflective Practitioner , 1983 .

[42]  C. Blackmore,et al.  A systemic approach to managing multiple perspectives and stakeholding in water catchments: some findings from three UK case studies , 2007 .

[43]  N. Röling,et al.  Challenges to science and society in the sustainable management and use of water: investigating the role of social learning , 2007 .

[44]  T. Lynam,et al.  A review of tools for incorporating community knowledge, preferences, and values into decision making in natural resources management , 2007 .

[45]  Ray Ison,et al.  The research-development relationship in rural communities: an opportunity for contextual science , 2000 .

[46]  R. Ison.  Some reflections on a knowledge transfer strategy: a systemic inquiry , 2002 .

[47]  Amanda H. Lynch,et al.  WORKING AT THE BOUNDARY Facilitating Interdisciplinarity in Climate Change Adaptation Research , 2008 .

[48]  Peter Checkland,et al.  Soft Systems Methodology: a 30-year retrospective , 1999 .

[49]  Ray Ison,et al.  Trusting Emergence: Some Experiences of Learning about Integrated Catchment Science with the Environment Agency of England and Wales , 2010 .

[50]  R. Ison,et al.  Building learning catchments for integrated catchment managing: designing learning systems based on experiences in the UK and South Africa. , 2009, Water science and technology : a journal of the International Association on Water Pollution Research.

[51]  Erin E. Dooley,et al.  United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification 1994 , 2017 .

[52]  Humberto R. Maturana,et al.  From Being to Doing: The Origins of the Biology of Cognition , 2004 .

[53]  Pieter van der Zaag,et al.  Adaptive and Integrated Water Management: Coping With Complexity and Uncertainty , 2008 .

[54]  S. Schwartzman,et al.  The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies , 1994 .

[55]  E. Ostrom,et al.  The globalization of socio-ecological systems: An agenda for scientific research , 2006 .

[56]  David McClintock,et al.  Conceptual Metaphors: A Review With Implications for Human Understandings and Systems Practice , 2004, Cybern. Hum. Knowing.

[57]  Ronald D. Brunner.  A Paradigm for Practice , 2006 .

[58]  Patrick Steyaert,et al.  The role of knowledge and research in facilitating social learning among stakeholders in natural resources management in the French Atlantic coastal wetlands , 2007 .

[59]  H. Nowotny.  Democratising expertise and socially robust knowledge , 2003 .

[60]  Claudia Pahl-Wostl,et al.  The Growing Importance of Social Learning in Water Resources Management and Sustainability Science , 2008 .

[61]  A. Rip.  A co-evolutionary approach to reflexive governance - and its ironies , 2006 .

[62]  Arie Rip,et al.  TAKING EUROPEAN KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY SERIOUSLY Report of the Expert Group on Science and Governance to the Science, Economy and Society Directorate, Directorate-General for Research, European Commission , 2007 .

[63]  E. Wenger.  Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity , 1998 .

[64]  C. Pohl,et al.  Handbook of transdisciplinary research , 2008 .

[65]  R. Ison,et al.  Agricultural extension and rural development: breaking out of knowledge transfer traditions: a second-order systems perspective. , 2007 .

[66]  Roland Schenkel,et al.  The Challenge of Feeding Scientific Advice into Policy-Making , 2010, Science.

[67]  W. Torbert,et al.  Action Inquiry: The Secret of Timely and Transforming Leadership , 2004 .

[68]  Ray Ison,et al.  Research, part of a Special Feature on Social Learning in Water Resources Management Illuminating the Possibilities for Social Learning in the Management of Scotland's Water , 2007 .

[69]  E. Ostrom.  Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems , 2010, American Economic Review.