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"Moore, Michele"
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Imagination and transformations to sustainable and just futures
The ability of individuals and groups to identify, assess, and pursue alternative possible futures is an essential component of their ability to deliberately and collectively respond to major sustainability challenges rather than experience unguided or forced change. Deliberately engaging in transformation processes inevitably requires imagination. We refer to imagination for transformations as interdependent cognitive and social processes that create representations of present and possible future states of the world that can inform public deliberation, policy, decision making, and behavior from the individual to the global scale. We contend that imagination is an essential capacity for securing ecological, social, economic, and cultural well-being in times of rapid and often unpredictable global change. We sketch an emerging interdisciplinary research agenda on imagination as a transformational capacity and its role in transformation processes, building on contributions to a special issue on this subject. We specifically focus on imagination in relationship to transformative agency, causation, and individual-collective dynamics. Our aim is to identify research questions and challenges that are most pressing with a view to supporting efforts of transformations toward sustainability.
Journal Article
Kid confidence : help your child make friends, build resilience, and develop real self-esteem
\"Help kids cultivate real, lasting confidence. In Kid Confidence, a clinical psychologist and parenting expert offers practical, evidence-based parenting strategies to help children build satisfying relationships, embrace personal growth, and discover the freedom that comes with a quiet ego--a deeply rooted sense of competence, confidence, and compassion for oneself and others\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Surmountable Chasms
Complex challenges demand complex solutions. By their very nature, these problems are difficult to define and are often the result of rigid social structures that effectively act as “traps”. However, resilience theory and the adaptive cycle can serve as a useful framework for understanding how humans may move beyond these traps and towards the social innovation that is required to address many complex problems. This paper explores the critical question of whether networks help facilitate innovations to bridge the seemingly insurmountable chasms of complex problems to create change across scales, thereby increasing resilience. The argument is made that research has not yet adequately articulated the strategic agency that must be present within the network in order for cross scale interactions to occur. By examining institutional entrepreneurship through case studies and examples, this paper proposes that agency within networks requires specific skills from entrepreneurs, including ones that enable pattern generation, relationship building and brokering, knowledge and resource brokering, and network recharging. Ultimately, this begins to build a more complete understanding of how networks may improve human capacity to respond to complex problems and heighten overall resilience.
Journal Article
The concept of the Anthropocene as a game-changer
After tracing the antecedents of the concept and considering its intersection in social innovation research, we put forward the argument that the Anthropocene concept points to three areas of thought that are strategically imperative and must be accelerated if social innovation theory and practice is to prove transformative and respond to the challenges associated with the Anthropocene. First, we contend that the current debate on social innovation for sustainability lacks a deeper focus on human-environmental interactions and the related feedbacks, which will be necessary to understand and achieve large-scale change and transformations to global sustainability. Many innovations focus on only the social or the ecological, and we believe a more integrated approach will be needed moving forward. Second, social innovation research must confront the path-dependencies embedded within systems, and we propose that the act of “bricolage,” which recombines existing elements in novel ways, will be essential, rather than single variable solutions, which currently dominate social innovation discussions. Finally, we put forward the idea that confronting the cross-scalar nature of the Anthropocene requires revisiting both the scope and temporal nature of social innovations that are most typically focused upon by scholars and funders alike. We believe the concept of the Anthropocene creates new opportunities for social innovation scholars to imagine new possibilities.
Journal Article
Relational approaches to sustainability transformations: walking together in a world of many worlds
Transformations to sustainability require alternatives to the paradigms, practices, and policies that have generated social-ecological destruction and the Anthropocene. In sustainability science, several conceptual frameworks have been developed for transformations, including social-ecological, multi-level, transformative adaptation, and pathways approaches. There is a growing shift towards recognising transformations as ‘shared spaces’ involving multiple ways of knowing, being, and doing. Diverse relational approaches to transformations are increasingly articulated by Indigenous, humanities, and social science scholars, practitioners, and activists from the Global South and North. Broadly, relational approaches enact alternatives to separable categories of society and nature, emphasise unfolding relations between human and non-human beings, and highlight the importance of ethical responsibilities and care for these relationships. Yet while it is important to recognise the collective significance of diverse relational lifeways, practices, and philosophies to transformations, it is also vital to recognise their differences: efforts to produce universal frameworks and toolboxes for applying relationality can reproduce modernist-colonialist knowledge practices, hinder recognition of the significance of relational approaches, and marginalise more radical approaches. In this paper we explore five intersecting ‘relationalities’ currently contributing to discussions around transformations: (i) Indigenous-kinship, (ii) systemic-analytical, (iii) posthumanist-performative, (iv) structural-metabolic, and (v) Latin American-postdevelopment. We explore how these different relational approaches address key concepts in transformations research, including human-nature connectedness; agency and leadership; scale and scaling; time and change; and knowledge and action. We suggest that their diversity gives rise to practices of transformations as ‘walking together in a world of many worlds’ and support intercultural dialogue on sustainability transformations.
Journal Article
Transformative spaces in the making: key lessons from nine cases in the Global South
Creating a just and sustainable planet will require not only small changes, but also systemic transformations in how humans relate to the planet and to each other, i.e., social–ecological transformations. We suggest there is a need for collaborative environments where experimentation with new configurations of social–ecological systems can occur, and we refer to these as transformative spaces. In this paper, we seek a better understanding of how to design and enable the creation of transformative spaces in a development context. We analyse nine case studies from a previous special issue on Designing Transformative Spaces that aimed to collect examples of cutting-edge action-oriented research on transformations from the Global South. The analysis showed five design phases as being essential: Problem Definition Phase; Operationalisation Phase; Tactical Phase; Outcome Phase; and Reflection Phase. From this synthesis, we distilled five key messages that should be considered when designing research, including: (a) there are ethical dilemmas associated with creating a transformative space in a system; (b) it is important to assess the readiness of the system for change before engaging in it; (c) there is a need to balance between ‘safe’ and ‘safe-enough’ spaces for transformation; (d) convening a transformative space requires an assemblage of diverse methodological frameworks and tools; and (e) transformative spaces can act as a starting point for institutionalising transformative change. Many researchers are now engaging in transdisciplinary transformations research, and are finding themselves at the knowledge–action interface contributing to transformative space-making. We hope that by analysing experiences from across different geographies we can contribute towards better understanding of how to navigate the processes needed for the urgent global transformations that are being called for to create a more equitable and sustainable planet Earth.
Journal Article
Studying the complexity of change
Faced with numerous seemingly intractable social and environmental challenges, many scholars and practitioners are increasingly interested in understanding how to actively engage and transform the existing systems holding such problems in place. Although a variety of analytical models have emerged in recent years, most emphasize either the social or ecological elements of such transformations rather than their coupled nature. To address this, first we have presented a definition of the core elements of a social-ecological system (SES) that could potentially be altered in a transformation. Second, we drew on insights about transformation from three branches of literature focused on radical change, i.e., social movements, socio-technical transitions, and social innovation, and gave consideration to the similarities and differences with the current studies by resilience scholars. Drawing on these findings, we have proposed a framework that outlines the process and phases of transformative change in an SES. Future research will be able to utilize the framework as a tool for analyzing the alteration of social-ecological feedbacks, identifying critical barriers and leverage points and assessing the outcome of social-ecological transformations.
Journal Article
Navigating emergence and system reflexivity as key transformative capacities: experiences from a Global Fellowship program
The distinction between adaptive and transformative capacities is still not well understood, and in this study we aimed to build a transformative learning space to strengthen transformative capacities. We proposed that two capacities will be essential to transformation: the capacity to navigate emergence and cross-scale systems reflexivity. We outline our efforts to design and deliver a Global Fellowship program in social innovation, intended to strengthen these two capacities among practitioners already engaged in socially innovative work. Results indicated that the concepts, frameworks, and experiences introduced through the Fellowship led to four key insights about these capacities. Firstly, individual Fellows and their organizations were able to see some complex system dynamics that were previously invisible, which in turn, allowed Fellows to see the distribution of resources and agency across the system in new ways. Secondly, engaging with diversity is essential in social innovation and transformative change processes, and system reflexivity aided in doing this. Additionally, Fellows indicated they were able to identify different kinds of opportunities and the generative potential that can lie within social-ecological systems. Lastly, the findings demonstrate the challenging nature of crossing scales and how a transformative space, such as a Fellowship, helps to practice the experience of contestation, unpredictability, and the uncontrollable dynamics of transformation and social innovation.
Journal Article
Degrees of change toward polycentric transboundary water governance: exploring the Columbia River and the Lesotho Highlands Water Project
Complex challenges emerging in transboundary river basins reveal a need to include a range of interests and actors in governance processes. Polycentric governance is one framework that can address this need and inform adaptive and resilient governance processes in transboundary basins as linked social and ecological systems. Here, we explore whether and how nonstate actors might be contributing to a shift in governance toward polycentric systems for the Columbia River (Canada/USA) and the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (Lesotho/South Africa). Using data gathered from 60 in-depth interviews, our empirical results illustrate four governance themes relevant to the emergence of polycentricity in the case study basins: authority, flexibility, coordination activities, and information sharing. Although the emergence of polycentricity is limited by existing state-centric governance regimes, these regimes show evidence that polycentric traits are supplementing existing governance systems, influencing policy processes, and introducing a range of management values.
Journal Article