Upstream in a social learning process

“Social learning: A change in understanding that goes beyond the individual and spreads within communities or groups through social interactions between people¹”. The process sounds benign in this simple definition of a multifaceted process but often Social Learning reveals or generates tensions as conflicting interests emerge. We’re tracking such a process as part of the Climate Change and Social Learning project that is supporting the initial phase of a project in Hoima-Uganda. The project aims to link Integrated Watershed Management (IWM) tools with social learning approaches as part of an effort to enhance the adaptive capacity of communities to climate change in Hoima-Uganda. The Albertine Zone in Uganda in which Hoima lies has been identified as one of the areas to be most impacted by climate change in Uganda.

Social Learning group

The story that is emerging from the initial participatory research illustrates the inadequacy of our sector categorisations in framing the complexity of people’s lives as well as the power of participatory approaches focusing on addressing issues across a large scale. The context and process so far are summarized in these extracts from an interview with the team leader, Prof. Dr Moses Tenywa² about this early phase. Dr Gerd Foerch³ and Alex Zixinga, a project assistant, also contributed to the interview.

What you have learnt from the process so far, including if there were things which came up that you didn’t expect?

Discharge in river Kiiha

When we went out we were trying to go and do Integrated Watershed Management but also use a Social Learning approach. The stakeholder meeting .... yielded a lot of information we had not expected. The reason for that was that at no time in history had the communities organised around the river stream to be able to recognize the factors that affect them, and especially the importance of water and how it is affected. We invited stakeholders from upstream, downstream and the middle-stream of river Kiiha and by bringing them together for the first time they were able to reflect on issues pertaining to their stream water, its use and even land management and even socio-economic activities that are impacting negatively on the environment and their lives. They were also able to recognize some of the implications, for example they do distillation and many of them take that alcohol and there is a lot of domestic violence and sexual abuse and many of those things. So when we brought them together they were able to reflect on those things and bring them up. It was more like an eye-opener

Initially, because they had never been organized around that theme, when they came they were ‘innocent’…. They came expecting the usual kind of meeting that they have with people from agriculture or development or regional development people. They were expecting the usual discussions, but when we engaged with them asking questions about issues pertaining to upstream, downstream, mid-stream, that’s when they began really reflecting and recognizing that they belong to the same unit which is affected by issues which perhaps in the past they took lightly, just observing some activities or felt that they could not do anything much. But then they realized they are a group together, that they have a voice that they can be able to take some form of action. They say, “we have learned that water is life even in the meeting we have taken water” and “this pollution of the stream has been has been killing our wildlife and flocks and in the future it will kill them”. That kind of realization was the first time and it came through the meeting.

What does that learning mean for your plans: are you changing any of your plans following the outcomes of the first, consultative phase, and if so how and why?
Yes, we are going to change the phase in that we are going to allow in-depth sharing of the social groups so that they can be able to learn more from each other

The process brought out tensions between distillers and other users, a deep seated opposition of interest. Can this be addressed in a small project like this or is it out of scope?

Distillers - photo from New Vision

 (Note that news of the same issue in the same area has reached the national press, as illustrated opposite)

I think it is possible to bring out, to improve the understanding especially considering that they have been working as individuals and those who distill in bushes have no major contacts with community as such and many come from outside the community. People fear that because they are from outside they worry less about the pollution and exploit the community. That they (the distillers) will see that it has reached a level where everyone is now concerned, that there is now an outcry that they will run back to their areas. At the same time there is a possibility that some of the leaders and community members have conflicting interests, that they may also be investors … (only now) … realizing how dangerous it is to the water and their lives.

The major issue now is that the quality of the water has deteriorated and they can’t use it so even the leaders who may have been benefiting from the activities through some social learning may begin changing their attitudes. So however small the impact I think it can help profound change that can take place.

Dr Gerd Foerch, who is working with the project team, added:
After learning about this experience we’re thinking about how to initiate a process where the SL will lead to better planning within the watershed. We have to adjust in the second phase which will come up in August how to get this question into our programme and how to get a better involvement from the water management zone management for that bigger basin. The most interesting thing is to get involved in a process that is not only happening in this watershed but is happening in one way or another in whole country. So … the challenge we would like to take up is to bring science and Development together.

Notes

1. Social learning for adaptation: a descriptive handbook for practitioners and action researchers
2. Prof. Dr. Moses M. Tenywa, Makerere University, College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences (CAES), Director of the MSc Programme Integrated Watershed Management, Member of IWMNet.
3. Prof.Dr.-Ing. Gerd Förch, Makerere University, CAES, Visiting Professor for Integrated Watershed Management, Initiator of IWM postgraduate training in East Africa, retired from Siegen University, Founding Member of CICD – Centre for International Capacity Development, and IWMNet
4. Pictures from Hoima by from the project team

Are you digitally competent?

So you are on the West Manhattan cycleway on your way to work at the mission in the UN and a US airways Airbus A320-200 crash-lands, deafeningly, on the Hudson river beside you.

Being a well-trained diplomat you respond coolly. You assess the situation and realise instantly that you can be of no practical help in the water - freezing - and that boats are already turning and heading towards the plane, which is beginning to settle lower in the river. This is NYC, so your first-aid training is probably going to be trumped by the well qualified professionals who are doubtless already leaving their bases. So do you join the increasing number of shocked spectators on the waterside, take out your smartphone and start filming the scene or do you get back onto your bike and head quickly to the mission so that you can contribute to the response of your national delegations in New York and Washington DC.

Wait - haven't you even taken a photograph? Being digitally competent you take a good shot, tweet it it immediately, echoing your post onto the Embassy Facebook page, with a message of support and praise for the pilot and the US response  (You work for an enlightened Foreign Ministry, that encourages staff to be active in social media and trusts them to do so professionally and competently -  you've had training, of course). Then you head to the mission, already working before you've even taken off your Lycra. By the time you've showered you've got messages from too many colleagues and friends to deal with immediately, as well as several acknowledgements from different US agencies. Both you and your embassy are well connected on social media, having identified 'influencers' who can support your own policy positions and engaged with them regularly online. You talk it over with your colleagues and agree that part of the official response should be a quick blog from you, expressing your personal reactions - which are only now beginning to make themselves felt - as well as appreciation for those who've saved 100s of lives, and maybe making an appropriate reference to a national issue of relevance. You've blogged before, understand how to walk the fine line between personal and professional (talking to people as a person, but from within the context of your professional position), how to upload and embed your photo, make links to other relevant websites.... and so on. Which means that you will be able to make your 11 am appointment.

The digital dimension of a Capacity Development 2 

We developed a digital competency framework as a tool for our social media training and development work and have used it in a wide variety of contexts, including with diplomats at all levels, hence the references above. The framework is grounded in the notion of behavioural competencies, used to guide, assess and evaluate holistically how people operate within their work, as introduced in a previous post. There we suggested how being digitally competent is clearly an essential component of any definition of a Capacity Development 2, the concept we have been exploring with a team of Itad staff and associates for the UN GEF. Thanks to team-member Cheryl Brown in particular, we extended our standard '5Cs' model, drawn initially from the work of Howard Rheingold on digital literacy, into a two level, 8Cs model. We identify three foundational and five core competencies.

Foundational competencies

These are largely passive in nature (reading, looking and listening), maintaining a low profile, keeping in touch with what is going on and who is active

• Comprehend
• Connect
• Check Context

Core competencies

These competencies are about active engagement in digital media and platforms, developing a profile and working with others to build inter-connected collections of content

• Collaborate
• Create
• Critique
• Curate
• Communicate

We provided more information about each of these in a Google Spreadsheet, along with examples of how they are used and links to illustration reference sites. The competencies are mapped in the table to elements of the GEF Theory of Change although of course the framework is transferable to other contexts.

We're very interested in any comments and suggestions for improvements.

Capacity Development 2 - Behavioural Competencies in a Digital World

There can’t be many tenser moments in life than following behind your child as she cycles, more or less steadily, on a main road towards a busy roundabout, and then wobbles as she raises her right arm out to signal and turns her head quickly to try and spot a space in the stream of cars coming up behind. And then there’s the time she sets off alone with her friends to do the same route and you have to trust that she has learnt enough traffic sense to be able to negotiate the same roundabout on her own or, and this is the final ‘wake in the night rigid-with-fear’ moment, that she’s developed enough in all the senses necessary to be able to react quickly and intelligently to the unexpected, which the complexity of the human-machine-environment interface is likely to throw at her. So if you’ve ever helped a child to ride a bicycle then you’ll know with aching certainty that simply learning how to stay upright on two wheels while moving forward is only the first step in absorbing a whole new way of behaving, indeed being.

It’s very similar – though with little of the accompanying tension and heartache – to working with people as they learn to navigate digital technology and its extension, software programmes. ‘Technology Stewardship’ involves a certain amount of simple skills training but is much more about working with people as they navigate into a new way of being that involves using technology and interacting with software. And operating online, in social media and other web spaces, is analogous to cycling in a busy city, having to apply the simple skill-set in a dynamic context where the most complex and unpredictable element is other people. That complexity is one of the reasons we have embraced and promoted the notion of digital competencies as a way to frame the gamut of skills and behaviours involved in operating effectively as a digital citizen. There is a wonderfully rich visualisation of digital competencies in the JRC conceptual model (Ala-Mutka, 2011) 



We have written and presented elsewhere about this methodology, which informs a lot of our training work, but in this first part of a two part post we want to ground that concept in the underlying principles of the Behavioural Competency approach more generally and link it to the work we have been doing on conceptualising Capacity Development 2. And in a second post we will introduce an extension and update of our usual 5Cs framework.

The impetus for this post comes from our work with Itad and two associates on developing a framework for ‘Capacity Development 2’, as part of a brief for the UN Global Environment Facility (GEF). The brief arose as a follow-on from the IDS climate change knowledge exchange, where a colleague from the GEF Evaluation Unit recognized the potential of, among other things, the use of ‘Web 2.0’ tools and approaches in KM & Capacity Development. In the early part of the brief the Itad team quickly widened the scope of the work from technology 2.0 to a more holistic exploration of contemporary approaches to Capacity Development. As part of this we concentrated on the underlying principles of competency-based approaches, the focus on how people behave towards each other and their work. This, of course is in marked contrast to the skills training that can be seen as a typical activity of a CD1, where participants are ‘taught’ how to complete definable tasks and activities. “A competency is more than just knowledge and skills. It involves the ability to meet complex demands, by drawing on and mobilizing psychosocial resources (including skills and attitudes) in a particular context” (OECD, 2005:4).

To say ‘Susheela is a competent manager’, for example, is both a compliment and a description of a set of behaviours. It implies that Susheela has learnt a range of skills in dealing with complicated tasks – constructing and monitoring project budgets, for example. But is also implies that she performs those skills well in a complex context, for example: working with a range of people and organisations; aligning what she is doing with the strategic and operational requirements of her own organisation; bringing to bear her own experience and knowledge, learned mostly from different contexts. Defining, measuring and developing such a collection of learned behaviours and skills is the essence of competency-based approaches that have been central to much Knowledge Management (KM) and Human Resources Management (HRM).

The assessment of observable behaviours, as part of a Behavioural Competencies Framework, is widely used in staff management systems. The United Nations Competency Framework, for example, includes desired competencies such as, “teamwork: supports and acts in accordance with final group decisions, even when such decisions may not entirely reflect own position”. We suggested in our paper that, “the behaviours which might be a product of a CD2 approach, for example, could include collaborate within and across teams and organisational boundaries or tell stories and identify shared purpose through narrative.”

Behavioural competencies are a crucial link between individual and organisational and network levels of capacity development. Behavioural competencies also contribute to and are enabled or blocked by the wider enabling environment. For example, the UN framework referred to above includes the indicator, “gathers relevant information before making a decision”. However, this is evidently dependant on the availability of accurate information. And the study revealed that, unsurprisingly perhaps, the concept of competencies as a frame for engaging with capacity holistically, is still to be embedded in the work of the GEF. For example, competencies, albeit expressed vaguely (eg, “handling conflict”) are a focus in some cases but "the approach tends to be CD1 (train people) rather than CD2 (look holistically at the context and motivational issues relevant to a desired behaviour)."

In the next post we will focus specifically on digital competencies.