Photo credit: Carolin Seiferth.
By Carolin Seiferth, Erik Andersson, and Maria Tengö.
There is broad consensus that addressing sustainability problems requires collaboration between different people, but engaging in collaborative change-making in practice remains challenging.
In this study, we wanted to understand how and why people with different backgrounds can get better at collaborating. We present our work on the Swedish island Öland, where farmers, representatives of environmental protection and cultural organizations as well as municipalities and regional authorities came together for a series of three workshops to discuss strategies for addressing water scarcity.
Rather than focusing on the content of the discussions, we looked at ways in which people related to one another. We call this relational learning–learning how to relate to others through listening to different viewpoints, working through disagreements or tensions, and connecting on a personal level. To explore relational learning, we analyzed insights from reflection exercises and interviews with all 17 participants.
We found that all 17 participants developed new ways of thinking and interacting. They gained a deeper understanding of water scarcity problems on Öland, became better at understanding other people’s values, developed collaborative strategies, and built relationships and trust among themselves. Detailed examples of how people changed the way they think about others illustrate that it is possible to address conflicts of interest and tensions around managing shared resources like water. Our work also shows that learning to relate to others requires more than just bringing people together and we hope to inspire researchers, decision-, and policy-makers to carefully design workshops and other platforms for dialogue as spaces for exchange, meaning-making, and reflection to nurture fruitful collaboration–within and beyond the scope of their projects.
Relational Thinking 