Facilitating communities of practice as social learning systems: a case study of trialling sustainable sanitation at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS)

Abstract

While social learning is advocated as critical for inducing large-scale shifts toward sustainability, methodological issues associated with designing the opportunities for social learning or guidelines for practitioners seeking to facilitate such learning in cross-disciplinary teams working on sustainability-oriented projects are lacking. This paper draws on a two-year pilot project in Sydney, in which government, industry and academic partners collaborated to learn about the development potential of urine diversion (UD) systems in practice. The concept of ‘Communities of Practice’ was used to identify inherent challenges and opportunities for social learning. An outcome of the project has been the identification of overarching principles for designing opportunities for social learning in such projects, particularly the need (1) to facilitate community-oriented leadership, (2) to develop strategic exercises for collaborative engagement and (3) involvement of actors beyond the boundaries of the experiment to introduce novelty, diversity and cumulative learning opportunities.

Keywords:

• Social learning
• Communities of practice
• Innovation
• Community-oriented leadership
• Boundary spanning
• Collaboration

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the UTS Cross Collaborative Challenge Grant for funding the implementation of the UD trial, Sydney Water Company for funding analysis of urine, the National Garden Industry Association for funding the reuse of urine in pot trials and Caroma Dorf for funding Australian standards testing and supplying necessary technology.