Environmental Change and Social Learning

Abstract

Pervasive environmental change, and the failure of top‐down technical solutions to respond to such change, has triggered a paradigm shift in environmental management. A social‐ecological systems approach, which recognizes the social and institutional dimensions shaping ecosystem processes and dynamics, has emerged. Within this paradigm, the concept of social learning has gained traction, with a substantial effort devoted to understanding the way in which social learning can build social‐ecological resilience and adaptive capacity. In recent years, the conceptual and practical limits of social learning have scaled up the focus, from a concentration on the processes of social learning to a focus on the design of multiscalar governance regimes that can facilitate social learning.