Laura van Oers presents at the 6th NEST Conference

On Friday, April 9th, Laura van Oers presented the paper ‘Sustainability transitions as processes of unlearning’at the sixt annual conference of the Netowrk of PhD students and Early Career Researchers on Sustainability Transitions – NEST (held online).

Abstract

Sustainability transitions involve multiple, deep changes of practices and beliefs that dominate current ways of being and doing. Herein, learning is envisioned a vital means to creatively transform unsustainable regimes and escape path-dependency and lock-in (Geels and Deuten 2006; van Mierlo and Beers 2020; Plummer and van Poeck 2020). It is critical to recognise that such learning involves the development of new knowledge, skills, technologies etc. as much as doing away with old ones. Recognition of this dialectic nature leads to our argument that sustainability transitions are not only process of learning, but also processes of unlearning.

Considering that, sustainability transitions may be perceived as entangled processes of ‘learning’ and ‘unlearning’. Unlearning is not simply the reverse of learning, rather it is often considered an antecedent of new learning and a catalyst for dynamic change; it involves i) initial destabilisation of obsolete practices or beliefs, ii) ongoing discarding and iii) learning something new (Fiol and O’connor 2017; Nygren et al 2017). The objective of our paper is to contribute to a better understanding how sustainability transitions can also be understood as processes of unlearning. Specifically, we seek to contribute to the emerging research field of ‘learning in transitions’ in two concrete ways (Beers and van Mierlo 2017; van Mierlo and Beers 2020; van Poeck et al 2020).

First, at a theoretical level, there remains a vast opportunity to critically consider how the concept of unlearning can inform a more comprehensive understanding of sustainability transitions. Sustainability transitions necessitate individuals and organisations to critically reflect on, and discard obsolete practices and beliefs which are deeply rooted in our societies. While it is mentioned that such ‘deep-learning’ requires some degree of unlearning (Laininen 2012; van Mierlo and Beers 2020), unlearning is seldom used as a research concept in studies of sustainability transitions. Unlearning is however well developed and widely adopted in research on organisations, businesses and management (Nystrom and Starbuck, 1984; Tsang and Zahra 2008; Fiol and O’connor 2017), where it is often related to organisational survival: without unlearning, organisations fail to create welcoming conditions for novelties (Becker 2008; Fiol and O’Connor 2017). Reaching out to organisational studies enriches theoretical understandings of sustainability transitions as processes of change and accredits the difficulties in breaking away from old routines.

Second, at the empirical level, this paper contributes to the perceived lack of empirical observations on learning and specifically unlearning, in transition studies (Mierlo and Beers, 2020). Correspondingly, as interest in unlearning continues to grow in organisational studies, there have been calls for empirical evidence to advance the field (Klammer and Gueldenberg 2018; Becker and Bish 2019).

We take on this double challenge by studying unlearning in concrete examples of sustainability transitions, specifically cases of the adoption of solidarity payments schemes in community supported agriculture (CSA) initiatives. Methodologically, we make use of qualitative data and event structure analysis (ESA) to evince that sustainability transitions are processes of unlearning (Heise 1988). We hone in on transitions within food communities in the Netherlands, which work towards more just agri-food systems and aim to understand whether the adoption of solidarity payment schemes, entailed community members to question and reject extant, practices or skills (‘performative unlearning’) and/or assumptions, beliefs or values (‘cognitive unlearning’); and what facilitated this questioning (‘triggers of unlearning’). We conclude that an unlearning perspective provides an opportunity to expand and enhance theory and practice on learning in sustainability transitions, and provides a stimulating perspective for future research.