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UNESCO Chair: Sustainable heritage and environmental management
New paper

Co-creating cultural narratives for sustainable rural development: a transdisciplinary learning framework for guiding place-based social-ecological research

The CULTIVATE project recently had its first paper published in Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability. In this paper, the authors present a novel transdisciplinary learning framework that links notions of cultural heritage, landscape, and social-ecological systems thinking to support sustainable rural development.

Figure showing the interactions across spatial scales and governance levels.
Transdisciplinary learning framework for guiding place-based social-ecological research. Sustainable rural development is operationalised through a four-step iterative process of continuous dialogue, learning, and collaboration among communities and stakeholders for understanding, exploring, cocreating and furthering knowledge of cultural heritage ‘in the making’ to increase the sustainability and resilience of landscapes in times of global change.
Photo:
Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability

Main content

Abstract

Place-based social-ecological research is crucial for understanding local sustainability challenges. However, lack of transferability of insights to other locations and to larger scales remains challenging. In this paper, we present a novel transdisciplinary learning framework that links notions of cultural heritage, landscape, and social-ecological systems thinking to support sustainable rural development. Continuous dialogue, learning, and collaboration among communities and stakeholders, including researchers, take centre stage in this framework. We outline the four steps of the framework, conceptually integrating and operationalising how dialogue, learning, and collaboration can take place in each step. We tested the framework in the CULTIVATE project, which explored the role of cultural heritage narratives in supporting sustainable rural development in four European UNESCO Biosphere Reserves. The framework successfully guided our research and comparative cross-case analysis, thereby contributing to aggregate learnings from place-based social-ecological research to develop knowledge at the national or global scale.

Click here to read the full paper.