The sustainable management of natural resources (SMNR) is concerned with socially and environmentally just decision-making processes around the access to, and the control over, natural resources. However, SMNR is imbued of multiple (and conflictual) intersecting knowledges, practice, expertise and value systems, as well as unequal power relations. This makes achieving meaningful and inclusive collaborative practices far from straightforward, and by no means easy to guarantee. This chapter discusses some evidence from Wales, drawing from a wider cross-boundary doctoral research project (led by the first author) on collaborative forms of SMNR, co-developed by a small transdisciplinary team of academics (the two co-authors) and (cross-divisional) civil servants within Welsh Government. Specifically, this chapter discusses the first author’s experience of transdisciplinary collaboration through the methodological lens provided by blending the Formative Accompanying Research (Freeth, R. (2019). Formative Accompanying Research with Collaborative Interdisciplinary Teams. Doctoral Thesis.) and the Embodied Researcher approach (Horlings et al., 2020). We offer a critical reflection on the first-hand experience of co-experimenting alongside policy actors with alternative and more creative ways of working in the spaces in between the written publication and implementation of SMNR legislation and policy.We explore the role of creative methods such as Theory U (Scharmer, 2018) in further promoting collaborative processes of meaning-making in transdisciplinary research settings, highlighting their contribution towards enabling emotional and embodied ways of working to be forefronted. In so doing, the chapter illustrates the role of emotional labour, vulnerability and energy in such co-experimental work by emphasizing the need for the practicing of care in building relationships of trust and collaboration, especially within the context of just sustainability transformations. We conclude by stressing the importance of dedicating sufficient time and resources to enable a culture of care (Bellacasa, 2017; Tronto, 2013) such that embodied and collaborative ways of working can be more fully supported and understood within governmental institutions.
This article presents This article presents findings from a transdisciplinary research project on collaborative practices for the sustainable management of natural resources (SMNR) in Wales. Here, the legislation establishes that the national well-being agenda and the principle of SMNR in environmental governance must be achieved through collaborative and participatory practices, across sectors and organisations, including within the public sector. However, neoliberal and hyper-bureaucratic governance structures, characterized by a risk-adverse nature, do not allow public sector institutional actors to experiment and engage with such practices in their everyday work. This article discusses a collective experience of reflecting on, and challenging such oppressing neoliberal structures, through experimenting with alternative ways of doing and being together. The emerging community at the heart of this experience is composed of policymakers, practitioners, artists, and academics (including the authors), who together carved out a 'site of negotiation' to contest techno-managerialism and mere rational approaches to (natural resources) governance. In the course of this research, these actors began to collectively create and shape new and shared meanings of doing collaborative and cross-boundary work (as required by the Welsh legislation), based on relationships of trust, reflexivity, embodiment, and relationality. Reflecting also on our own experience (and interpretation) of working alongside them, we believe that such emergent processes of collective meaning-making have the potential to transform neoliberal (environmental) governance structures into 'lived' and 'owned' institutions. Inspired by relational, integrative and caring forms of democratic governance, we argue that professionals in public sector organisations can realign governance structures in ways that meet the challenge of enabling the rapid and wide sustainability transformations that are so desperately needed.
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