Phases

The phase examines and compares seasonal representations underlying adaptation in various institutions in each case study, guided by questions like: Which representations are used in the institutions? By which mechanisms do they shape, and get shaped by,institutions? How do they conflict or reinforce each other? Which inspire more trust and are used more often? And how do they reflect rapid natural and social change? These questions invite robust social science descriptive work – inspired by ethnographic enquiries in STS and anthropology – looking through constitutive and interactional coproduction lenses.
The constitutive lens is concerned with how seasonal representations emerge at the boundary of nature and society and are held in place, becoming stable and powerful for understanding our place in the world. It can help diagnose how climate change affects old representations and re-constructs new (scientific) ones.
The interactional lens focuses on how representations and institutions dynamically make and remake each other, and particularly how representations claim authority in institutions. It can expose dominant narratives in seasonal adaptation governance, and relates these to social categories like power, interests, or gender.

This phase moves from a descriptive to a normative mode, engaging institutional actors as collaborators in studying the relationship between their seasonal representations and successful adaptation, and appraising the quality of these representations in the context of climate change. It is guided by questions like: What makes representations of high quality for supporting adaption in an institution, and which are of highest quality? How is this quality affected by rapidly changing social and natural orders? How ought representations be re-produced? These questions are contingent to institutions and social groups in each place, so appraisal must be similarly contingent to be locally robust; conducted in cooperation with local actors incorporating their own criteria, values, knowledge and experience.

This phase engages an extended science lens, looking at ways of including non-scientists’ knowledge and values in scientific enquiry; encompassing traditions of sustainability science. It is particularly steered by post-normal science perspectives (Funtowicz & Ravetz 1993), with CALENDARS extending the normal ‘peer community’ to include institutional actors. This peer community conducts peer review that is dialogic in nature, concerned with how to access high quality knowledge under significant uncertainty, contentiousness and high stakes.

Here the project moves into a creative phase, inviting the ‘extended peer community’ to reflect on what they have learned, and conceive of alternative seasonal representations better fitted to todays experience. This builds on normative Phase 2, and asks how ought we anticipate and cope with current and future seasons, evoking Hastrup’s (2016) call to ‘mak[e] scenarios for the future, which contain realistic expectations based on the knowledge assembled’. It also asks what mechanisms will help or hinder institutions adopting alternative representations; ranging from power, to time lags and inertia in institutions. This phase provides a setting for peers to learn from creating seasonal representations, and studies this coproduction process for insights into how new representations can potentially take hold in institutions, relative to facilitators and barriers. Three lenses focus this work.

The institutional lens looks at co-production as a mechanism for building adaptive capacity in institutions, by helping people learn and innovate technologies for change (Armitage et al. 2011).
The social learning lens looks at settings for learning to learn and how learning loops establish institutional change (Collin & Ison 2009). The empowerment lens looks at empowering marginalised knowledge systems, like traditional knowledge (Ignatowski & Rosales 2013).