Research Findings
Policy interventions have tended to be concerned with identifying ‘skills sets’ for sustainable communities. These skills sets are considered universal and to be attained through formal learning. This research found that the development of skills and knowledge for sustainable communities has to happen at a local level. Furthermore, the process of learning is highly significant. Skills and knowledges cannot be un-problematically imported from elsewhere through formal education channels alone. The transfer of skills and knowledge is dependent upon ‘learning by doing’ and ‘learning by seeing’. By shifting the emphasis from skills sets to processes of learning, the influence of local circumstance in the creation of local skills and knowledges become visible. Acknowledgement of local circumstance is also important because of the complex linkages which exist between sustainable communities and the everyday lives of people in place. Here, these factors are characterised as involving the right combinations of time, people and place.
The first of these, time, emerged as a significantly neglected issue in the context of sustainable communities. Yet, time management proved to be a key issue in relation to the practical accomplishment of how people manage their everyday lives in the context of sustainability initiatives. This has made visible the complex and highly skilled time-space coordination activities that extend beyond the sustainability initiatives themselves and into people’s everyday lives. Also significant is how people actually talk about time, and use it as a resource to frame their experiences of skills in relation to sustainable community initiatives in which they are involved.
The importance of people with different skill sets and lived experiences regularly coming together in place, was another significant feature of the research. Many respondents identified the relationships and local networks between community members, rather than individual skills, as being important for sustainability initiatives. These relationships enable effective transfer of ideas and information on sustainability. The regular face-to-face contact that everyday community life affords plays an important role in this process of continued knowledge transfer.
‘Sense of place’ is also significant in the creation of sustainable communities. Place making is already a key notion in the sustainable communities skills policy agenda. However, implicit in its current usage is an assumption that places have a coherent, stable and unproblematic identity. This ignores the diversity and multiple ways in which places are known on a daily basis. Place is not a fixed, stable, single location, but the sum of its social relations. Many research respondents prioritised emotional values and attachments to local places and local people, over formal skills sets. This suggests that, in determining how best to support skills and knowledge for sustainable communities, simultaneous acknowledgement must always be given to the specific social, environmental and economic conditions of each local community. In order to do this we need to move beyond ‘one size fits all’ policy approaches, which are based on either the attainment of universal skills sets, or understandings of ‘place’ as something which is coherent and fixed.
