Designing just sustainable and digital transitions through socially responsible education and training
Just twin transitions
As explained in a previous EPALE blog, twin transitions are systemic shifts to a greener and more digitalised status. Simply put, twin transitions are processes in which the actors who form a social system intentionally and systematically pursue goals related to sustainability and digitalisation. In these transitions, digital tools facilitate the achievement of sustainability targets, while sustainable thinking guides and shapes digitalisation.
However, transitions involve a high degree of uncertainty. Despite the benevolent intentions, they might negatively impact some social groups and/or the environment. For instance, the passage from traditional agriculture, which heavily relied on human work, to the more industrialised form of farming that promoted the Green Revolution in the 20th century was followed by several environmental (e.g., water contamination due to the extensive use of agrochemicals) and societal problems (e.g., the inability of small-scale farmers to follow the stream of change, which widened the gap between wealthy and poor producers).
These negative and potentially harmful aftermaths of transition processes led policymakers and researchers to seek ways to ensure that transitional pathways and processes follow principles promoting justice. The term “just transitions” emerged to describe fair and equitable systemic change, which takes into account the impacts that transitions are expected to have on social groups and the environment (Wang and Lo, 2021; Heffron and McCauley, 2018; McCauley and Heffron, 2018). In the case of combined shifts towards more digitalised and sustainable socio-technical systems, just twin transitions refer to socially responsible transition processes which promote changes that do not put social groups and natural resources at risk, while offering society-wide and fairly distributed benefits.
Socially responsible upskilling initiatives
Can adult education and training support just twin transitions? Upskilling actors involved in twin transitions is undoubtedly a fundamental precondition for facilitating the process. However, when focusing on justice, social responsibility thinking must be involved in the design of education and training programmes.
In practical terms, that means anticipating the impacts of transitions on social groups and the physical environment and blueprinting education/training initiatives to maximise the positive and minimise the negative impacts. To do so, relevant programme designers have to follow a sequential process involving the identification of potential externalities that a transition might have and organising a programme that is responsive to learners and society.
The basic principles of such a design are the following:
Designing education and learning programmes in a way that ensures the presence of social responsibility in their content.
Focusing on the building of responsibility-related competencies.
Generating positive ethical, social, and environmental change through learning.
Using an impact ripple canvas approach to design socially responsible adult education/training programmes: The experience of the project “Digitalizing Short Food Supply Chains - SFSCs 4.0”
The present blog post reports on the experience derived from an ongoing research project[i] titled “Digitalizing Short Food Supply Chains.” It aims to promote just twin transitions in the agrifood sector by identifying digital technologies that can guide the sustainability transition of short food supply chains[ii], estimating their impacts on farms, farmers, and society, uncovering adopters or potential adopters’ training needs, and designing responsible training interventions. The project followed a socially responsible design path to achieve the latter objective. In other words, by complying with the principles mentioned in the previous section, it intends to design training activities that promote change while ensuring a better life for trainees and other social groups.
Applying such design thinking requires:
Multi-actor collaboration to combine different “knowledges” and points of view. How actors experience transitions depends on their positions in socio-technical systems, experience, knowledge, and ambitions. Hence, involving actors with different professional backgrounds (farmers, researchers, technology developers, policy-makers, and adult educators) in the design process can let new ideas emerge, thus enhancing the quality of training programmes.
Forward-thinking, given that the impacts of twin transitions unfold gradually as socio-technical systems move from one state to another.
A systematic taxonomy of impacts at different levels, ranging from personal and professional to community-related and society-wide.
A concise focus on the potential negative impacts accompanying transitions and the development of appropriate training interventions to mitigate them.
To taxonomise impacts, as proposed by Borthwick et al. (2022), the project’s research team conducted a series of multi-actor workshops in which participants collaboratively developed impact ripple canvases. An impact ripple canvas is a tool that visualises the impacts that twin transitions may have on actors participating in the transition process and society.
When an object drops into the water, it causes a ripple, i.e., a series of concentric waves. The central idea of an impact ripple canvas is to uncover the waves of impacts created after the initiation of the transition process. That is to say, to provide an answer as to who is affected and how. After identifying potential impacts, workshop participants must collate impacts into themes, reflect on them, and develop training topics. Adult education/training programme designers can then refine these topics, outline their content, choose appropriate teaching techniques, and draw a functional sequence of training sections to facilitate trainees’ learning and skills development.
Instead of focusing exclusively on trainees, the canvas approach permits the identification of societal impacts and the development of training content that can mitigate possible social externalities of the transition process. Nevertheless, a socially responsible design needs more time, effort, energy, and resources than conventional planning of adult education/training programmes. It also requires highly skilled workshop facilitators who are competent in engaging attendees in the canvas development procedure and cultivating a participatory culture, as well as designers capable of developing societally responsible programmes. Despite its challenging nature, designing socially responsible education and training programmes is a worthwhile path to ensure just twin transitions.
[i] The research project was supported by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (H.F.R.I.) under the “3rd Call for H.F.R.I. Research Projects to support Post-Doctoral Researchers” (Project Number: 7762).[ii] Short food supply chains are market schemes in which farmers sell their products to consumers either directly (e.g., through farmers’ markets, food boxes, on-farm or online selling) or with the intervention of only one intermediary, with the first case being more common (Charatsari et al., 2023).
References
Borthwick, M., Tomitsch, M., & Gaughwin, M. (2022). From human-centred to life-centred design: Considering environmental and ethical concerns in the design of interactive products. Journal of Responsible Technology, 10, 100032.
Charatsari, C., Lioutas, E. D., Michailidis, A., Aidonis, D., De Rosa, M., Partalidou, M., ... & Camanzi, L. (2023). Facets of value emerging through the operation of short food supply chains. NJAS: Impact in Agricultural and Life Sciences, 95(1), 2236961.
Heffron, R. J., & McCauley, D. (2018). What is the ‘Just Transition’? Geoforum, 88, 74-77.
McCauley, D., & Heffron, R. (2018). Just transition: Integrating climate, energy and environmental justice. Energy Policy, 119, 1-7.
Wang, X., & Lo, K. (2021). Just transition: A conceptual review. Energy Research & Social Science, 82, 102291.
About Chrysanthi Charatsari
Chrysanthi holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural Education and Extension from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She has completed four postdoctoral fellowships in Agricultural Extension, Rural Sociology, and Adult Education. She participates as a scientific responsible or research associate in many projects funded by the European Union and/or national funds. Among other research activities, she has developed an adapted version of Farmer Field Schools for Greek farmers. Today, she is a visiting lecturer at the Hellenic Open University and a postdoctoral researcher at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She has published more than 90 papers in peer-reviewed journals, collective volumes, and proceedings of international and national conferences. Her research interests include agricultural extension/education, agricultural innovation, digitalisation, sustainability transitions, and innovative learning techniques.
