A design framework for creating social learning situations

Abstract

Learning nurtured through experimentation is very important for enabling sustainability transitions. Over the last decade, different strands of research have investigated social learning and its associated processes to better understand learning efforts aimed at socio-technical system change. While some necessary process considerations to enable social learning have been established, actual design and organisation of experiments that aim to create a social learning situation remain largely unexplored. Against this background, this paper presents an empirical, mixed-method study that investigated a governance experiment within the Australian urban water sector. This experiment enabled widespread learning, resulting in socio-technical system change. The research reveals that social learning in particular is more complex in reality than in theory and that not all system stakeholders need to learn the same to achieve system change. Further, this paper develops a framework that outlines enabling starting conditions and features for designing and organising social learning situations. The framework comprises focus projects, multi-organisational peer groups, distributed facilitation, adaptability and flexibility, time and science/research. The key findings provide practical strategies for designing and operationalising policy and governance reform agendas that embrace learning situations.