It was over 2 years ago now that I joined this research project at the University of Bath's Centre for Action Research (CARPP). Back then the project was called "Unlocking Low Carbon Potential"; now it's called "Lowcarbonworks" and we have a project website here if you'd like to know more. Either project title conveys quite well what the project is about. We had this underlying assumption that though decarbonisation inevitably involves technology, the barriers to moving in that direction are more likely to be psychological, social and organisational. We wanted to use action research to look at ways to not only understand these barriers better, but also to somehow address them.
I was to set up some kind of research stream within this overall project direction.
I started to read up on various theories that I thought might help us to understand how decarbonisation can come about. I read about organisational change theory, decision theory, evolutionary theory and topics like that. The more I read about this however, the more it seemed that whilst the lack of change might be very frustrating, it actually was completely normal. These theories were saying that 'Business as usual' is exactly what we should expect.
So I decided to shape my research around examples of where carbon reduction really had happened and really try to get 'under the skin' of how these had happened. I thought that if we got right into the mess of human experience in these examples, we might get some interesting and useful learnings. Learning Histories, spearheaded by George Roth and Art Kleiner at MIT seemed a good way to do this. Read more about how they describe Learning History here. A colleague of mine at the centre, Rupesh Shah had used Learning Histories in his PhD Thesis and Hilary Bradbury, a well-known action researcher and friend of the centre at Bath had done some influential work with Learning Histories with the Swedish educational charity - the natural step.
I read some of Rupesh's PhD quite early on. The librarian had grinned at me, I thought a tad malevolently, as she handed me the gigantic tome from behind the desk. But as I sat down and started to read, I became enthralled. I must have made for a strange sight in the library that day - grinning, clucking and shaking my head as I read a very dry looking hardbacked PhD. Rupesh's account of his trip to what it was really like to try to conduct a learning history between two closely related organisations (in his case, Shell & the NGO Living Earth) was fascinating and showed up really interesting issues around power and also areas in the approach that really required attention.
Not long after that I arranged to meet Rupesh and we went for a long walk along the canal near Bath. I told him I hoped to do a learning history, not of one organisation but of a handful of organisations across Local Authorities. "What's your common storyline?", he asked, "you need something that binds them together in some way". Together we talked about how it could be "The story of how local authorities innovate for low carbon".
You can read more about what a Learning History is by following the link.
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Blogs are so informative where we get lots of information on any topic. Nice job keep it up!!
Posted by: PhD Dissertation | October 26, 2009 at 01:09 PM