Author: Mia Chung

Summary: Building community resilience requires global to local thinking outside of sectoral, disciplinary, and positional divisions. We share ways to foster knowledge exchange and deliberation using ISET’s Shared Learning Dialogues as a tool for meaningful engagement.

Climate change represents a unique challenge as a global force with profoundly local consequences. In ISET’s experience, effectively building community resilience to climate change requires integrating emerging global scientific knowledge with the place-based knowledge of Indigenous Peoples and other local communities. It also requires overcoming the divisions that typically exist within a locality between sectors, disciplines, and worldviews. 

In British Columbia, any of us working on disaster risk reduction (DRR), climate change adaptation (CCA), or resilience building are acutely aware of the urgency of reducing vulnerabilities, even as we work to meet the challenge of bringing everyone onto the same page. Engagement and learning are crucial aspects of meeting this challenge. But what does it mean to do this in a good way? Based on ISET’s experience of developing and implementing a tool called the Shared Learning Dialogues (SLD), we share our thoughts.

SLDs – A process for facilitating meaningful engagement

The SLD is a stakeholder engagement process rooted in participatory action research. Characterized by non-extractive, mutual learning among participants, the premise of the SLD is straightforward: by fostering iterative deliberation and non-hierarchical sharing of multiple specialized ways of knowing, perspectives, and worldviews, the quality and effectiveness of decision-making will be improved. 

Simply put, the SLD process involves a series of facilitated meetings. However, it is much more. The SLD process is a semi-structured, dynamic, and strategically facilitated succession of interactions. The structure and composition of an SLD process is easily adaptable to meet the needs of the organizers as well as the social context, and the facilitator may choose to use any number of tools and techniques to generate discussion and interaction. Depending on how they are designed, SLDs can challenge conventional power dynamics, confound existing and seemingly well-established doctrine and understanding, and induce uncomfortable but safely held interactions between institutions and actors. The knowledge produced from the SLD process can assist all levels of decision-makers to identify possible interventions, target potential constraints, and set priorities. Indeed, SLDs create the perfect container for positive disruption for community resilience.

Multi-directional information sharing

In SLDs, stakeholders are invited to recognize that some knowledge systems, especially Westernized and colonial world views, have been given more priority than others – and that an opportunity now exists to rectify the imbalance. An issue as complex as climate change cannot be resolved knowledge system by knowledge system. Rather than allowing expert status, sectoral bias, or politicized talking points to limit the directions of knowledge exchange, stakeholders representing disparate sectors, scales, and worldviews must step back, listen, and work together to create a multi-dimensional view of their system and its causal pathways. In Texas, ISET held dialogues between community members, emergency service providers, climate scientists, and government decision makers, asking when severe weather turned into a problem for participants. Rather than starting with a particular framing of an issue, the conversation began with developing a shared reality. From there, the science could attach to entry points relevant to the community. The result was a broad understanding of the impacts on communities, which supported the development of contextually-driven procedures, evidence, and planning that provided useful solutions to mutually-recognized issues.

Radically open interaction

Building shared learning requires safety, trust, and patience. Participants need to be able to contribute their views and experiences, and also have time to absorb and think about the information and perspectives of different groups. A skilled, knowledgeable, and sensitive facilitator is crucial for ensuring the appropriate container for this type of growth. In New Mexico, a skilled ISET-supported facilitator with good community relationships led the use of SLDs in a community significantly impacted by wildfires. Meetings were held in a location convenient to the community, and key local, regional, and national actors were invited to attend from the outset. All attendees were fed with a homemade meal. Afterwards, one of the leading regional actors in attendance commented that a much broader range of people had attended this meeting than any previous meeting they had been part of, resulting in new dialogues and a useful way of thinking about how to collaborate into the future.

Transboundary implementation – cross-scale, cross-community, cross-organizational, cross-discipline

Disasters do not distinguish between “mine” and “yours”. Reducing the risks of climate disasters and improving the resilience of communities requires key stakeholders to come together as “us”. In SLDS, the goal with engagement is to bring together local, regional, national, and global perspectives for results, while seeking to overcome knowledge system divides on positioning typical of sectors and interest-holders. In some cases, such as ISET’s experience in Indonesia, the movement of information had only ever been in a single direction, from local government to communities. The SLDs were the first opportunity for communities and community organizations to meaningfully collaborate with local decision-makers.

Iterative process

Good engagement is not “one and done”. Participants need multiple opportunities to share, generate, and understand new knowledge. This allows for sequential growth in understanding and leads to increased levels of comfort and more meaningful dialogue among participants. Each iteration can introduce new or enhanced knowledge into the process. For example, in one of the communities ISET worked with in Vietnam, the first meeting with community members and local government identified that part of their experience of flooding was due to reservoir management – and that they had never had an opportunity to speak with the reservoir operators. Reservoir operators attended the next meeting, where they shared that they had a siren system for water releases, housed near their facilities. Communities shared that they were located too far away to hear the alerts. By the final meeting, a solution was achieved: relocate the alert system.

How the SLD process can help

The SLD process, when iteratively and carefully enacted, fosters knowledge exchange, dialogue, and deliberation to nurture learning, innovation, and flexibility. With 20 years of proven success in systems thinking, application of resilience frameworks, climate change adaptation, and community-first global learning applied to local contexts, ISET can help you and your community create transformational impact. We are a registered BC non-profit, and committed to an equity informed, partnership and relationship focused way of working. We invite you to connect with us as we continue on this shared learning journey to support you in building your community’s resilience.