Reflexively stumbling towards sustainability: understanding social learning in regional governance networks

Current sustainability challenges are regarded as very complex and even wicked in that they are contested and ambiguous with respect to their underlying knowledge, values and causes, as well as with respect to the pathways that might help in addressing them. In order to meaningfully engage with such challenges, a so-called transition perspective is increasingly advocated in both science and society. Transition here is seen as a delicate composition of entangled non-linear processes of social change by which a societal system is structurally transformed towards a state that is deemed more desirable, here more sustainable, than the current one. These proposed new ways and shifts call for the active seeking or inviting of pluralism in situations where old routines no longer suffice in light of complex sustainability challenges. Governance networks are networks where many actors are involved, such as municipalities, entrepreneurs, educational institutes, NGO’s, citizens and other actors. These networks have a relatively stable character and provide so-called discursive spaces where analyses, diagnoses, and solutions can be debated, negotiated and, under certain circumstance, even be co-created. . Within such networks there is a high degree of interaction and interdependency. Reflexive governance networks can help communities respond to complex problems, when they aim to co-create new knowledge, new relations and new policy. For this, a process of collaborative learning is seen as core to the transition process. The concept of social learning is promising in this context, because it takes the diversity of actors, knowledge, perspectives, languages and interests, as a starting point for the creation of new-shared knowledge. The concept of social learning has also been developed to understand processes of social transformation as learning processes. Through this lens, social learning can be seen as a double-edged process: where individual learning and interactive learning take place simultaneously in a process of social change with effects on wider social-ecological systems. By applying a constructivist actionable methodological approach and using a mix of methods (e.g. retrospective analysis, reflexive monitoring, semi-structured surveys , open interviews and learning histories), the research was able to reveal that in the hybrid and discursive space where actors interact, they may encounter lack of trust, and/or a lack of commitment and/or lack of willingness to reframe underlying assumptions about both the root causes and possible solutions to sustainability challenges. When the networks are facilitated networks, which is often the case, they might need some skilled facilitation from change agents in order to become reflexive. Other actors or objects can behave as change agents or boundary spanners, between the different perceptions, interests and cultures contributing to the governance networks.