EU-SPRI26

It was my first attendance of the EU-Spri conference. I have to admit, it first appeared on my radar last year only. EU-Spri stands for European Conferences on Policies for Research and Innovation and was founded in Paris in 2010. While the innovation space is not new to me, the policy space is. So I knew, attending the conference, I would learn many new things.

Together with a great team at the Athena Institute at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, we submitted an abstract about Theories of Change as boundary objects for transformative learning. Many big words… Admittedly, a couple of months ago I was not very familiar with these concepts. Theories of Change refers to the idea that we theorize on how the world changes. Theories of Change are an approach to formalize (write down) how we think things will change. This approach has been used in certain fields (e.g. development programs) for a long time. Now they are more and more used as well in sustainability transformation contexts. This makes sense as sustainability transformations, amongst others, aims to provide theories on how sectors (e.g. agriculture) or societies overall transform / change to achieve sustainability. There are widely used theories (such as the multi-level-perspective). However, Theories of Change, I would argue, provide a skeleton that can be filled with meaning, leaving more space for people to describe the process of change. This is what a boundary object can do. It is an object that is ambiguous enough so it can be used and interpreted by different people. People can fill it with meaning and can us the filled object to connect with others who filled the object with meaning as well. Imagine it is a cake, we can make fruit cake, chocolate cake, cheesecake, etc. We know what a cake is, so when we bake our cakes we can later exchange on how we did it and why, etc. We can talk about why chocolate cake is the best one and get convinced that strawberry cake is better (on hot summer days).

Transformative learning is an approach that is about changing the learner’s mind. It aims to address our perception of the world, our assumptions and expectations. The goal though is not to indoctrinate people to change from one worldview to another one. Rather it is about making people aware of their own worldview, supporting people’s openness to other worldviews and allowing the integration of other worldviews through a reflexive process. We would like to employ Theories of Change to potentially facilitate transformative learning. There is more details to this, of course. I do not want to expand on our research at this point. This is for another blog post.

I work interdisciplinarily and thus, I frequently get in contact with new research fields or disciplines. The current research is no exception. Attending the EU-Spri Conference helped me to better understand the field of evaluation. Thus, it was very insightful.

The insightful sessions aside, I very much enjoyed many of the keynotes. It was a pleasure to hear Andrew Stirling holding a keynote. Amongst others, he talked about the need to increase diversity of views within research. Personally, what he stated about the dominance of certain linear theories resonated very much with me. This is reflected in one of my lead-authored papers (Biely & Chakori, 2024). He specifically referred to the Multi-Level Perspective and the S-curve transition trajectory that this theory suggests (Geels, 2005). Proponents of this theory have often defended it as being not linear, as it is visibly a S-shaped curve (curve, not line!). Still, how the theory presents transitions very much presents a technocratic transition that can be managed or directed. I think, the fallacy of the analysis based on the MLP is the assumption that an ex-post insight translates to ex-ante predictions. Yet, we know from chaos and systems theory, initially many futures are possible. Our ability to trace history back and make assumption about what lead to which event (ex-post) should though not lead us to believe that we know how the future will unfold (ex-ante). Stirling presents an image that reflects this instance. The pattern of a river delta. Imagine a river that has many arms. Or a tree with many branches. The MLP picks one branch and presents the logical cause-and-effect selection of one technology, ignoring that we would have been unable to predict which branch the future will prioritize. A book that explains this well and to which I have referred repeatedly is Robert Sapolsky’s (2023) Determined. If we could make such predictions, investment decisions would be easy... But because we do not know which technology or "soluion" will be successful in the end, we often invest in different technologies at the same time. Because of our inability to predict the future, Stirling argues that we need to foster diversity.

A concept related to systems thinking, presented by Dr. Asun Lear in her opening keynote, are fractals (O’Brien et al., 2023). Fractals are a phenomenon, where the small is represented / repeated in the big. We find fractals in nature. Think of the pattern of a Romanesco. You can search for the term in the search engine of your choice, to see the beautiful patterns. The idea of fractals is used in sustainability research for various reasons. One is scalability. The argument is that if we do things on a local or even personal level, we might have a bigger impact than we think. If fractals are present in social structures, then what we do on an individual level will be repeated on bigger levels. Thus, the individual and local level is more important than we think. As per usual here it needs to be emphasized that this does not reduce the responsibilities of governments, businesses or organizations.

From the conference track (Transformative Evaluation) I followed I take a statement on the need to change our evaluation approaches to reflect the future we want to build. In a round table discussion Jordi Morales stated that if we want to change certain things, we have to change the system overall. That then also applies to the evaluation we use. The evaluation approach we use needs to reflect the values and aspirations of the system we want to create. The tricky question is of course how to build bridges. We cannot just use new evaluation methods. We have to use old ones, while we develop, use and advocate for new ones. This is what we strive to do within the program I am currently working on. This does not only apply to evaluation but to everything connected to transformations. How to birth the new while the old is not yet dead (see Antonio Gramsci) is not a trivial question. When we combine the new with the old too much, we could provide legitimization for the old. Thus, we could help the old system survive longer, which is exactly the opposite from the intention. If we are too radical, we are unable to connect to the now and thus remain unused or neglected. I guess this is a balancing act that requires experimentation.

Then I want to return to the keynote by Amir Ledbioui. He presented on Biomimicry. This is an old concept, which aims at learning from nature and applying the lessons learned to engineering or innovation (think of the work from Leonardo da Vinci). A famous example is Velcro. The inventor observed the structure of clings to make Velcro. There are many more examples for this. The concept is also used for design and social innovation questions. A statement by keynote speaker made me think: "the main thing we take from nature is not material, but ideas". This is an appealing statement. And the talk was nice and had inspiring elements. Yet, I missed depth. If we take ideas and wisdom from nature then we have to accept that we are living on a planet with finite resources. From socio-ecology we know different patterns of resource over-exploitation and their effects. From research, that was also highlighted by other keynote speakers, we know that we are not meeting sustainability goals. From other research, we know that we are unable to sufficiently decouple our economic activity from resource use. This means that while we have become more efficient in how we use resources, the amount of resources we use is still increasing at a faster rate than economic growth. Given that we are using more resources than we should to stay within sustainability limits (i.e. planetary boundaries), any increase in resource use further endangers our future on this planet. While biomimicry is fascinating, the innovations inspired by nature also require resources. Thus, biomimicry does not solve the sustainability issues we are facing. I would have appreciated more reflections on this key insight that nature provides.

What would help is a closer human-nature relationship. Understanding that we are one and that over-exploiting the planet or people at the end, will only jeopardize our (human kind’s) survival. The program I am working on now (The Holomicrobiome), can potentially exactly do this. And we hope that through reflexive monitoring we will get a step closer towards a the realization that socio-ecological systems are one.

References:

Biely, K., & Chakori, S. (2024). Sustainability transition theories: Perpetuating or breaking with the status quo. Sustainable Development, n/a(n/a). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1002/sd.3101

Geels, F. W. (2005). The dynamics of transitions in socio-technical systems: A multi-level analysis of the transition pathway from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles (1860–1930). Technology Analysis & Strategic Management, 17(4), 445-476. https://doi.org/10.1080/09537320500357319

O’Brien, K., Carmona, R., Gram-Hanssen, I., Hochachka, G., Sygna, L., & Rosenberg, M. (2023). Fractal approaches to scaling transformations to sustainability. Ambio, 52(9), 1448-1461. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-023-01873-w

Sapolsky, R. (2023). Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will. Penguin Press.