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Contact: Thomas Falk and Björn Vollan

Sustainability discourses and innovations in experimental workshops

NISANSA is a joint BMBF-funded project by University of Marburg and University of Gießen and complements climate change research with regional and social science perspectives, focusing on the Global South. The project investigates which climate change impacts the societies of the Global South (southern Africa and northern South America) are confronted with, which potentials exist to react to them and which implications this has for the global North, Europe and Germany.

In Subproject 4 "Sustainability discourses and innovations in experimental workshops" Prof. Dr. Björn Vollan and Dr. Thomas Falk examine the behavior of local resource users in relation to different climate change and governance scenarios using experimental approaches. For this purpose, economic experiments are developed together with implementation partners, which are not only used to observe behavior but also to enter into a dialogue with the participants. Based on aforementioned scenarios, participants can experiment with different management options in a low-risk space, learn how fellow community members behave and what consequences their action can have in the long term and on others. This kind of playful experience can accelerate a real-life learning process. Building on this process, adaptation strategies and innovations will be discussed with the participants and various stakeholders. In this participatory process, we will try to better understand local knowledge about resource dynamics, to capture local discourses and, if necessary, to develop new community based adaptation strategies. The next step is to measure the impact of these experimental workshops by visiting the same village communities again a year later. If we find evidence for the intended impact, this can increase the motivation of implementation partners to integrate experimental workshops into their intervention strategies.

For more details, please see the NISANSA Website and have a look at the Website of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.