Learning for social-ecological change: a qualitative review of outcomes across empirical literature in natural resource management

Abstract

Learning is considered as a promising mechanism to cope with rapid environmental change. The implications of learning for natural resource management (NRM) have not been explored in-depth and the evidence on the topic is scattered across multiple sources. We provide a qualitative review of types of learning outcomes and consider their manifestations in NRM across selected empirical literature. We conducted a systematic search of the peer-reviewed literature (N = 1,223) and a qualitative meta-synthesis of included articles, with an explicit focus on learning outcomes and NRM changes (N = 53). Besides social learning, we found several learning concepts used, including policy and transformative learning, and multiple links between learning and NRM reported. We observe that the development of skills, together with a system approach involving multi-level capacities, is decisive for implications of learning for NRM. Future reviews could systematically compare how primary research applies different learning concepts and discusses links between learning and NRM changes.

Keywords:

• action-orientation
• institutional change
• qualitative analysis
• social learning
• transformative change

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Joanne Vinke-de Kruijf and Geeske Scholz for useful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. We would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable remarks that have helped us to refine this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/09640568.2017.1339594.

Additional information

Funding

The first author wishes to thank the Swedish Institute for a one-year visiting scholar grant to work at Stockholm Resilience Centre, Sweden. Preliminary results of this manuscript have been presented at the IST 2016 conference in Wuppertal, Germany, for which the first author received a mobility grant from SA Archimedes. Our research has been co-financed by Mistra through a core grant to the Stockholm Resilience Centre. Part of the work undertaken by Romina Rodela was funded under a grant from the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies (Östersjöstiftelsen).