Bruce Wilson highlights the importance of education and life-long/life-wide learning in the issue of sustainability. He asks where should we start? Those who go on in OTB to read the material in the Development: Where from, where to? [5] forum will understand that my response would be to involve a network like ‘Peoples Voice Media (PVM) [6]’ to get a ‘real ‘ discussion going on how communities and citizens can better understand what they can do and how engaged PASCAL professionals help them do it for themselves.
For far too long citizens and communities have been left out of the discussion. As a result they often see sustainability as a remote and somewhat intellectual entity.
So what I would like to see is for those following up Bruce’s good introduction on sustainability to form a series of questions to pose to real citizens and communities – those people operating at the local level - and also to pose short sharp notes on what engaged PASCAL professionals think are important topics to for them to understand to make constructive change.
We might also work with the Community Reporters in PVM to write up key stories off successful engagements in sustainability or how citizens/communities have overcome barriers to successful implementation of resilient processes. Let’s think about how OTB and PASCAL might facilitate this? For instance we might encourage a social network within PVM to get into a dialogue with PASCAL and work with us to develop sensible and sensitive guidance for improvement change for other groups.
I have also been interested in how the process of ‘Nudging’ could be adapted to promote citizen/community learning in a different way. Cass Sunstein – a Law Professor at Harvard – recently gave a most interesting video production on ‘Nudging and its Impact’ which is the subject of my discussion topic Enter Behaviour Change [7] and may further stimulate thoughts in PASCAL readers of OTB. Nudging is a different form of learning which can be extremely valuable for those who are unconventional learners or who havefound it difficult to learn about new processes and ways in the past. I'd like to hear from others who have found alternatives to conventional learning in case we can improve how we can support citizens and communities who wish to flourish under their own efforts.
James