Dear colleagues, The policies being used to address ecological issues around the concept of sustainability increasingly demonstrate how their impact goes beyond the environment to influence things such as public health, jobs, working conditions, and incomes. This means a more multi-stakeholder approach is required to the negotiation and implementation of environmental policies within and across sectors, and at local, regional, 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, NGOs and other community leaders working to support social learning and collective action around the environment and sustainability. 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. These include lessons from the HIV/AIDS sector, 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 pages 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 research methods and approaches section has links to action research resources, material on doing integrated and interdisciplinary research, a listing of on-line journals in these areas, and it hosts the IntSci (Integrated Science for sustainability) discussion network. New pages link to resources on underpinning social research methods including systems thinking 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 environment and sustainability sectors. 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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
