Building adaptive capacity of smallholder agriculture to climate change: evidence synthesis on learning outcomes

Increasing climate uncertainty coupled with more frequent extreme events poses a serious threat to the sustainability of smallholder communities dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods. Whilst there is extensive literature on adaptation options, there is a pressing need to understand what interventions have been successful in building smallholder’s adaptive capacity, and how these have been transferred (nationally and internationally) through learning outcomes. The aim of this rapid evidence assessment was to assess the extent to which learning outcomes have supported initiatives to mainstream adaptation, focussing on three key areas, (i) scaling up climate sensitive adaptive interventions, (ii) the role of knowledge management to promote effective adaptive solutions, and (iii) human-ecosystem interactions in climate change adaptation. A protocol for the review was defined, from which 806 sources of evidence were retrieved. After screening for relevance using inclusion criteria, 91 were selected and the salient evidence extracted and synthesised. Access to knowledge remains one of the most important determinants of smallholders’ decisions to respond to climate risk and a critical element in building adaptive capacity. The way knowledge is generated and exchanged is also directly relevant to securing effective scaling-up pathways. Learning platforms through participatory action research, farmer field schools and community-based initiatives were found to be particularly effective. However, knowledge based on local practices alone may be insufficient to prompt transformative action. Bridging local and external knowledge is critical because it widens the smallholders’ knowledge base and encourages ‘proactive’ adaptation alongside more typical ‘reactive’ strategies. The contribution of evidence reviews to provide new insights to inform decision-making and investment in international development and the implications for advocating climate-sensitive policies at national and global levels are discussed.

Questioning Nature in Late Middle Ages. A History of Method, Praxis and Innovation

This essay traces the interconnections between method, praxis and innovation with their epistemological consequences at the end of the Middle Ages. In the wake of scholastic natural philosophy, this vibrant process marks a milestone in the history of science. During the Thirteenth and Fourteenth centuries a profound transformation takes place in the way of observing nature through a meticulous data collection, experiments and subsequent analysis. In this cultural framework, the Franciscans analyze the realities of the world with an extremely original pragmatic dynamism. This approach gives priority to a practical sense of thinking through a transformative action which opens the doors to a pioneering scientific method and contributes to a long series of innovations. A positive result is an advanced didactics—especially developed by Buridan, Oresme and their followers —that will have a great impact on a continental level, changing the common ground of European science.

International Scientific Conference »Learning to Live and Work Togheter«

University of Maribor Faculty of Health Sciences is organizing the Online International Scientific Conference »LEARNING to Live and Work Together«, held on June 29th 2021. E-proceedings of the conference include most recent findings of domestic and foreign researchers and students in higher education, social work, nursing and health sciences. The conference aims to explore the quality of life for migrant students, transformative action in higher education, advances in nursing research and education as well as advanced nursing practice experience in Slovenian and international arena. It provides an opportunity to promote the development, dissemination and use of knowledge in the field of social work, nursing and health sciences for educators and health practitioners, furthermore they exchange research evidence, models of best practice and innovative ideas.

The Religius Diversity Space Formation Based Private Schools Affiliation in Malang City

The intolerance that has threatened Indonesia in the last ten years is an important trail to show that the management of diversity in Indonesia is currently having a complex problem. Many parties are starting to question the wisdom of schools as a participatory diversity laboratory. This research emphasizes best practice tolerance education that is integrated into the realm of the learning curriculum in schools, this study more focused on three high school level schools in Malang city based on religion using a comparative descriptive method described by a qualitative critical approach. There is a perspective that is the finding of this research, namely the vision of tolerance and the definition of diversity built-in schools to give birth to patterns of student interaction in daily synergy with other different students. This perspective theoretically can produce five patterns of diversity interaction, namely: first: collegial interaction, second; dialogical experiment, third; intergroup community formation, fourth; participatory ethics, and fifth; transformative action. These five patterns were naturally formed by the vision of tolerance created by the three schools through various activities, both intra and extracurricular, and became patterns of intense participatory interaction in daily activities at school.

‘We seem to be moving in circles’. How facilitative action research generates transferable and workable breakthroughs in policy networks that are stuck

Action Research can make an important contribution in bringing transformative action to contemporary complex societal problems. Critique upon its limited scope opens the discussion about transferability of outcomes. This paper discusses how facilitative action research enabled transferable and workable breakthroughs to policy practitioners feeling stuck in designed governance networks around complex care and safety problems in the Netherlands. Experiments with facilitated, collaborative conversations of relational inquiry with policy practitioners were conducted in practices in three different cities. Evidence from the three practices suggests that for breakthroughs to be transferable and workable, they need to be able to support a process of reliving and re-experiencing. Reliving and re-experiencing was enhanced when the researcher added a level of abstraction to the conversation by using systems-thinking inspired visuals. This way, policy practitioners were able to grasp the complexity of their situation as well as to see the unintended consequences of their actions. Subsequent naming of the visuals enhanced both the appropriation of the abstracted situation as well as facilitating the broader communication of the experience beyond the group of practitioners involved. Finally, by actively bridging the different practices in three different cities, the researcher was able to connect experiences and so enhance the feeling of reliving and re-experiencing beyond the individual practices. This way, a broader base of knowledge and experience about the problematique, and possible breakthroughs in the complexity of collaboration in designed policy networks, was created.

From Modern Planetary Health to Decolonial Promotion of One Health of Peripheries

The concept of Planetary Health has recently emerged in the global North as a concern with the global effects of degraded natural systems on human health. It calls for urgent and transformative actions. However, the problem and the call to solve it are far from new. Planetary health is a colonial approach that disregards alternative knowledge that over millennia have accumulated experiences of sustainable and holistic lifestyles. It reinforces the monolog of modernity without realizing that threats to “planetary health” reside precisely in its very approach. It insists on imposing its recipes on political, epistemological, and ontological peripheries created and maintained through coloniality. The Latin American decolonial turn has a long tradition in what could be called a “transformative action,” going beyond political and economic crises to face a more fundamental crisis of civilization. It deconstructs, with other decolonial movements, the fallacy of a dual world in which the global North produces epistemologies, while the rest only benefit from and apply those epistemologies. One Health of Peripheries is a field of praxis in which the health of multispecies collectives and the environment they comprise is experienced, understood, and transformed within symbolic and geographic peripheries, ensuing from marginalizing apparatuses. In the present article, we show how the decolonial promotion of One Health of Peripheries contributes to think and advance decentralized and plural practices to attend to glocal realities. We propose seven actions for such promotion.