Tropentag, September 16 - 18, 2015 in Berlin, Germany "Management of land use systems for enhanced food security – conflicts, controversies and resolutions"

Conflict Mediation and Educational Perspective about the Development of Climate Adaptation and Land-Use Strategies: CLARIS LPB and Sinergia Projects Experiences

¹Leibniz-Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF), Germany
²Ecoclimasol, France
³University of Santa Catarina State (UDESC), Brazil
⁴University of Buenos Aires, Geograph, Argentina
⁵kontrair, Germany

Abstract

Adaptive capacity to climate change can be improved by educational process. Communities have been revealed as vulnerable due to their biophysical and socio-ultural conditions, and also their lack of collective action to build adaptation strategies to climate. The collective action does not occur as a natural and spontaneous human interaction, neither it is a logical consequence of problems to be solved. Our intentions, our goals, our historical consciousness do not provide the success of our projects as much as the media we use (mediation between the "ends" and pursuing the "means"). There is a mediation, a way to be built, which is precisely what educators and policymakers should encourage in order to promote climate adaptation process. In this context, two workshops were developed to build primary land"=use scenarios and to design climate adaptation strategies according to different social contexts of participants (n=37) in two different South America cities. The used methodologies were: Compound Stimulus, Forum Theatre, and Diagram of Influences. Compounds Stimulus is a drama methodology that allows investigating and scenarios through few given elements and collective action. Through workshops it was possible to develop primary scenarios and adaptation strategies between the participants. Although the construction of scenarios requires further elaboration, the workshops are an initial step in this process, and considered essential to understand the impacts of climate change. The process developed was possible to imagine, to describe and to understand climate scenarios allowing three basic human creative capacities important to learning process: to organise momentary experiences; to predict
individual and collective future, and to live hypothetical stories. This result was also related with the concept of zone of proximal development that is the distance between the knowledge for which an individual already dominates and the knowledge that he is still dependent on the support of a group and mediation process.

Keywords: Climate change, popular education, rural development

Contact Address: Michelle Bonatti, Leibniz-Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF), Eberswalder Str. 86 , 15374 Müncheberg, Germany, e-mail: michebonattigmail.com