Communication and Resilience in Collaboration, Social-Ecological Systems, and Discourse

How does communication connect with and shape resilience and sustainability? I understand communication as a dynamic and context dependent concept. I draw my understanding of communication from systems, materiality, and discourse theories. I employ a mix of quantitative, qualitative, and critical approaches in three discrete projects focused on collaboration, social-ecological systems, and discourse. In the first project, my collaborators and I ask: how does an understanding of complex communication dynamics help identify ways to improve participation for intended collaboration outcomes across scales? We explore this question through a two-year mixed methods study of interdisciplinary collaboration and stakeholder engagement in Maine’s Sustainability Solutions Initiative. Our results demonstrate that decision making, collective communication competencies, participant identities and motivations, and social learning influence mutual understanding, inclusion of diverse ideas, and progress towards sustainability-related goals. Attending to how interactions recursively structure individuals, teams, and organizations may foster intentional transformation across scales. In the second project, we ask: how does communication influence conservation planning and the realization of resilience as organizational mission? We address this question through an ethnography using participant observations, focus groups, and interviews to study and inform Frenchman Bay Partners’ collaboration. In this project, we identify core process characteristics that help us collectively work the tides. In our efforts to promote resilience and sustainability we recognize that difference is necessary and productive. By maintaining process commitments such as checking the tide charts, creating intentional interventions, and by continually coming back to find ways to work together we promote sustainability. The third project is a discourse analysis of resilience using Foucauldian archaeology in which I ask: how does resilience become a thing to be known? I identify two primary problems with resilience discourse, namely the lack of attention to how language creates the conditions what becomes possible and how this limits creative and transformative insights for working with the world. The artifacts I investigate include resilience’s origins in ecology, systems ontologies and attractor models, and dialectics as ordering strategies. I seek transformation of the discourse and conclude by proposing a shift to materialist, vibrant assemblages for enhanced resilience and sustainability

“It’s just a cycle”: Resilience, poetics, and intimate disruptions

The phrase “It’s just a cycle” is commonly articulated in coastal resilience efforts and it also shapes broader public debates about climate change. Identifying the structure of arguments around cycles is a useful starting point for defining differences in perspective, but there is more to competing claims about cycles. It is this more that this essay aims to explore, starting with an opening example from an engaged rhetorical ethnographic project with Maine’s clam fishery. The example helps set up a methodological orientation to working with cycles within resilience-focused collaborations that draws from aesthetics and poetics. This approach aims to show how cycles shape world making and how attending to cycles as a trope can create a space for critical disruptions of colonial patterns. This is a space of intimate connection that allows cyclical rhythms, like those of tides, to help reveal a passageway to resilience

Resilience as Discourse

Resilience as a frame is increasingly appearing in grant funding, news stories, academic journals, and organization missions. Across these sites, resilience is positioned as an ability to cope, characterized by bouncing back, regaining control, and reducing vulnerability to change. How did resilience come to be understood in these terms? What are the problems with resilience’s frames and the practices that produce them? How might we become resilient differently? Using a Foucaultian archaeology, I examine sites and practices that produce resilience as discourse. I analyze resilience’s origins in biophysical sciences, systems perspectives that define ways of knowing, visual models that constrain the emergence of new ideas, and persistent dialectics that narrowly order relationships within the world. I propose changes in the discourse for more affective and ecological modes of becoming resilient

Interview with Robert Kates, Pathfinder in Sustainability Science

In this interview, Robert Kates discusses the challenges of sustainability science in moving from what scientists know to actions that can provide solutions to pressing environmental and development problems. Kates notes that sustainability science has the dual mission of addressing core scientific and intellectual questions, while at the same time addressing development in particular places. He suggests that one of the key questions is how to address long-term trends and transition to a “better synthesis between environment and society.

Entertaining our way to engagement? Climate change films and sustainable development values

How we communicate about climate change shapes our response tothe most complex and challenging issue society currently faces. In this paper,we conduct a discursive analysis and ideological critique of stereotypicalrepresentations in three climate change films: The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy (2008) and An Inconvenient Truth (2006).We argue that these films situate their treatment of climate change in anarrative context that reiterates troubling stereotypes about race/ethnicity,gender, and sexuality. These representations do not align with key sustainabledevelopment goals such as equity, freedom, and shared responsibility. Ouressay demonstrates how the stories we consume about climate change as weentertain ourselves potentially influence our sense of the world, guide ourrelationships to one another and impact our collective abilities to create a sustainable future

Why rhetoric matters for ecology

Increasingly, scientists and funding agencies such as the US National Science Foundation are recognizing the need for better science communication and more effective broader impacts activities. Compelled to make research more relevant to public stakeholders and policy makers, researchers look for ways to gain the necessary skillset to move their science from the field and laboratory into public forums. We suggest that the ancient discipline of rhetoric provides a useful – and underutilized – path forward. Building from the fundamental connections between ecology and rhetoric and drawing from practical examples at the intersection of these two fields, we demonstrate how rhetoric can inform training in science communication for better academic writing and broader impacts, and can promote interdisciplinary and cross‐institutional collaborations that support sustainability science. Integrating rhetoric and ecology helps to address complex and pressing sustainability problems through improved understanding, cooperation, and science and policy actions

Health, the Environment, and Sustainability: Emergent Communication Lessons across Highly Diverse Public Participation Activities

Most lessons about public participation are gleaned from very specific domains, yet innovative ideas often emerge when lessons across very different domains are brought together. Our public engagement efforts span health, the environment, and sustainability in rural and urban settings with long term residents as well as new immigrants. We have worked with hundreds of faculty and stakeholders in Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire on topics as varied as immigrant fishing in contaminated water, shared governance of shellfish areas, remediation of lead contamination in urban areas, and shared decision making on dam removal. The diversity of these efforts offers lessons about strategies for public engagement for decision making

Interdisciplinarity and Actionable Science: Exploring the Generative Potential in Difference

Community practice and actionable science share a commitment to solving complex problems to promote sustainability. Collective abilities to address these types of problems rely on interdisciplinary collaborations that also offer unique challenges. In this case study of a statewide interdisciplinary setting, we focus on key methodological differences related to problem identification, stakeholder involvement, competing research paradigms, and orientations towards communication. We argue the generative potential in interdisciplinarity is enhanced through sustained effort and attention to difference; acceptance of the ethical responsibility to reflect critically on power in shared decision making spaces; and strategic interventions to continually promote and improve learning

Health, the Environment, and Sustainability: Emergent Communication Lessons across Highly Diverse Public Participation Activities

Most lessons about public participation are gleaned from very specific domains, yet innovative ideas often emerge when lessons across very different domains are brought together. Our public engagement efforts span health, the environment, and sustainability in rural and urban settings with long term residents as well as new immigrants. We have worked with hundreds of faculty and stakeholders in Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire on topics as varied as immigrant fishing in contaminated water, shared governance of shellfish areas, remediation of lead contamination in urban areas, and shared decision making on dam removal. The diversity of these efforts offers lessons about strategies for public engagement for decision making

Citizen science and natural resource governance: program design for vernal pool policy innovation

Effective natural resource policy depends on knowing what is needed to sustain a resource and building the capacity to identify, develop, and implement flexible policies. This retrospective case study applies resilience concepts to a 16-year citizen science program and vernal pool regulatory development process in Maine, USA. We describe how citizen science improved adaptive capacities for innovative and effective policies to regulate vernal pools. We identified two core program elements that allowed people to act within narrow windows of opportunity for policy transformation, including (1) the simultaneous generation of useful, credible scientific knowledge and construction of networks among diverse institutions, and (2) the formation of diverse leadership that promoted individual and collective abilities to identify problems and propose policy solutions. If citizen science program leaders want to promote social-ecological systems resilience and natural resource policies as outcomes, we recommend they create a system for internal project evaluation, publish scientific studies using citizen science data, pursue resources for program sustainability, and plan for leadership diversity and informal networks to foster adaptive governance. Effective natural resource policy depends on knowing what is needed to sustain a resource and building the capacity to identify, develop, and implement flexible policies. This retrospective case study applies resilience concepts to a 16-year citizen science program and vernal pool regulatory development process in Maine, USA. We describe how citizen science improved adaptive capacities for innovative and effective policies to regulate vernal pools. We identified two core program elements that allowed people to act within narrow windows of opportunity for policy transformation, including (1) the simultaneous generation of useful, credible scientific knowledge and construction of networks among diverse institutions, and (2) the formation of diverse leadership that promoted individual and collective abilities to identify problems and propose policy solutions. If citizen science program leaders want to promote social-ecological systems resilience and natural resource policies as outcomes, we recommend they create a system for internal project evaluation, publish scientific studies using citizen science data, pursue resources for program sustainability, and plan for leadership diversity and informal networks to foster adaptive governance