permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lflj@intrex.net>]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [SANET-MG] Facilitating social learning and collective action to 
support sustainable management
Date: Sun, 25 Nov 2007 03:13:13 -0500
From: Will Allen <will@LEARNINGFORSUSTAINABILITY.NET>
To: SANET-MG@LISTS.IFAS.UFL.EDU

Dear SANET-MG readers,

Efforts to ensure sustainable agricultural practices and policies are
already demonstrating how the impact of sustainability goes beyond the
environment to include community impacts such as public health, jobs,
working conditions, and incomes. This means a more multi-stakeholder
approach is required to the negotiation and implementation of sustainability
policies within and across land management sectors, on farms and in
communities, and at national and international levels. Inevitably, the
reality is that whatever aims are finally chosen, implementing the solutions
to reach them will involve a long process of difficult dealings with a great
variety of individuals, groups, and institutions who can make them fail or
succeed.

The Learning for Sustainability site - http://learningforsustainability.net
- has been substantially revised and updated over the past few months as a
guide to on-line resources for government agency staff, extension
practitioners and other community leaders working to support social learning
and collective action. A central section of this site links the reader to a
range of guides, tools and checklists that can be drawn upon for guidance in
this area to address issues such as participation and engagement. Other
pages here highlight the lessons that have emerged from researchers and
practitioners in different sectors such as public health and protected
natural areas. They are shown on their different pages to highlight the fact
that each sector is looking at similar human dimensions practice change
lessons, and that the more we can learn across sectors the better. A new
page in this section now covers tools, tips and techniques for facilitators
and other social engagement specialists.

Other areas in the site provide links to best and emerging practice in
social learning areas including networking, dialogue, adaptive management,
and knowledge management. Evaluation is given its own section which covers
key topics such as participation, empowerment, logic models and scale. A new
section points to resources on underpinning social research methods
including systems thinking, interdisciplinarity and action research. One
page lists on-line resources for both post-graduate research students and
their supervisors. Topics include thinking about the supervisory team, as
well as tips for structuring and writing a thesis or dissertation.

The The Learning for Sustainability site -
http://learningforsustainability.net - also manages additional pages on
finding volunteering and job opportunities in the sustainability sector.
These are directly accessible from the main site indexing system. As with
the rest of the site these sections bring links to lot of on-line resources
together in one easy to access site, each link is annotated to provide a
guide to its contents.

Please feel free to pass this posting on to colleagues and friends who may
be interested in this content.

Regards
Will
--------------------------------------
Dr. Will Allen
LearningForSustainability.net - http://www.learningforsustainability.net -
Supporting dialog, collective action and reflection for sustainable 
development
E-mail: will@learningforsustainability.net