Abstract
This case report is about a regional land-use planning project in the Netherlands. Initiated by the province of Gelderland and Radboud University (RU), the project aimed to create “Communities of Ownership” (CoO’s), local associations of townspeople who would engage in collaborative vision-building related to sustainable land development. The guiding conceptual model was “The Natural Step” (TNS), a systems-level approach to sustainability. We describe the land-use project and the learning history we constructed to help project managers and facilitators learn from the different perspectives that project actors conveyed. The learning history indicated that the project had limited success. We discuss four factors shaping the project’s results and the lessons learned related to those factors. The first lesson concerns the importance of a shared vision for sustainability among stakeholder groups. The second focuses on the preconditions necessary to work with The Natural Step effectively in certain contexts. Lesson three is about what it takes for a learning history to serve as a catalyst for collective learning and project improvement. Lesson four sheds light on the importance of respecting differences in stakeholders’ levels of sustainability awareness. We speculate that these differences may have shared characteristics with the kind of developmental differences that constructivist stage theorists of human development have articulated. Finally, we discuss the implications of our analysis for the leadership of sustainability initiatives.
Highlights
Perhaps more than any other country in the world, The Netherlands depends on the thoughtful and effective management of water
The proposal called for the adoption of The Natural Step model as the innovation framework to guide the work of the university, the province and the Communities of Ownership” (CoO’s)
Before we thought of applying Ballard’s sustainability awareness levels as a lens through which to view learning history data, we looked for connections between Ballard’s levels and other studies examining the influence of different levels of ecological awareness, thinking, or caring on sustainability change efforts
Summary
Perhaps more than any other country in the world, The Netherlands depends on the thoughtful and effective management of water. The name of the nation, literally the “lower lands” suggests an existential truth: Large parts of the country would be underwater if it were not for the nation’s conscious relationship with its seas and bays, rivers and tributaries, and floodplains and deltas. Within this context of concern for its waters, The Netherlands faces a large challenge: River discharges are expected to fluctuate more, in approximately 50 to 100 years, due to climate change. This paper is an interpretive account of the project It begins with a description of the land-use planning initiative and moves into a description of the learning history. In the last major section, we explore implications of our analysis for sustainability leaders
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