As a kickoff of the tdAcademy Capacity Building event series Guido Caniglia (Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research) and Christopher Luederitz (Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University) shared fruitful insights into action-oriented knowledge for sustainability with us on September 21, 2021. They presented an approach to action-oriented knowledge for sustainability that is both integrated and pluralistic, and emphasized that a limited selection or disregard of certain kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing might hamper the creation of change.
Detailed overview of the presentation’s content:
Action-oriented knowledge for sustainability is the knowledge that supports actors’ understanding of how to create transformative change towards sustainability at the science-society interface, for instance in transdisciplinary projects, sustainability initiatives, and real-world experiments. This knowledge encompasses what the literature has defined as actionable, action-guiding, practical, solution-oriented, usable, transformation, and transformative knowledge.
In this presentation, Guido Caniglia and Christopher Luederitz present an approach to action-oriented knowledge for sustainability that is both integrated and pluralistic. They show that knowledge in the service of action emerges when working in integrated ways with the many kinds of knowledge involved in the shared design, enactment, and realization of change.
In their presentation, Guido Caniglia and Christopher Luederitz especially focus on how to use this approach:
- as an analytical lens to investigate post-hoc the role that knowledge has played in past and ongoing efforts to support learning and create change towards sustainability
- as an orientation compass to design and assess new or ongoing interventions and experiments (such as a transdisciplinary project) that aim to support individual and social learning a well as change towards sustainability.
Both as an analytical lens and as an orientation compass, the pluralistic and integrated approach that they present emphasizes that a limited selection or disregard of certain kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing might hamper the creation of change. This presentation thus can help participants to develop the capacity to combine pluralism and integration when navigating complex processes of change through research.