Building a community of practice for sustainability: strengthening learning and collective action of Canadian biosphere reserves through a national partnership.

Deliberation, dialogue and systematic learning are now considered attributes of good practice for organizations seeking to advance sustainability. Yet we do not know whether organizations that span spatial scales and governance responsibilities can establish effective communities of practice to facilitate learning and action. The purpose of this paper is to generate a framework that specifies actions and processes of a community of practice designed to instill collective learning and action strategies across a multi-level, multi-partner network. The framework is then used to describe and analyze a partnership among practitioners of Canada's 16 UNESCO biosphere reserves, and additional researchers and government representatives from across Canada. The framework is a cycle of seven action steps, beginning and ending with reflecting on and evaluating present practice. It is supported by seven characteristics of collaborative environmental management that are used to gauge the success of the partnership. Our results show that the partnership successfully built trust, established shared norms and common interest, created incentives to participate, generated value in information sharing and willingness to engage, demonstrated effective flow of information, and provided leadership and facilitation. Key to success was the presence of a multi-lingual facilitator who could bridge cultural differences across regions and academia-practitioner expectations. The project succeeded in establishing common goals, setting mutual expectations and building relations of trust and respect, and co-creating knowledge. It is too soon to determine whether changes in practices that support sustainability will be maintained over the long term and without the help of an outside facilitator.

Dismantling "Race" in Health Research.

In this era of confronting racism in public space, it is critical to keep addressing the covert systemic racism in the healthcare system. We want to bring attention to the continued unscientific practice of race-based medicine and the absurdity of treating race as a biological indicator in the 21st century. We believe race is a social construct that does not qualify as a scientific biological indicator for predicting health outcomes. In this paper, we first present arguments for inappropriate use of race in health research and then discuss alternative explanations for health disparity findings that use race as a predictor. Our main concern centers on two specific aspects of the concept of "race": (1) its fundamental lack of scientific basis as a predictor for health outcomes, (2) the misguided narrative that the term creates, placing the onus of racial discrimination on the victim, instead of highlighting the act of discrimination and the role researchers play in actively reinforcing racism when using "race" as a variable. We conclude by proposing that "race" be replaced by the variable "racism" in health.

Community of practice: an effective mechanism to strengthen capacity in climate change and health.

SETTING: Climate change is one of the greatest threats to global health in the twenty-first century and has recently been declared a health emergency. The lack of effective dissemination of emerging evidence on climate change health risks, effects, and innovative interventions to health professionals presents one of the greatest challenges to climate action today. INTERVENTION: To identify and address the knowledge gaps at the intersection of health and climate change, the Canadian Coalition for Global Health Research (CCGHR) established a Working Group on Climate Change and Health (WGCCH). WGCCH is evolving organically into a community of practice (CoP) that aims to elevate knowledge brokering on climate change and health and expand to global multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary realms. OUTCOMES: To date, the WGCCH established a regular webinar series to share expert knowledge from around the world on intersections between climate change and health, developed short summaries on climate change impacts on broad health challenges, supported young professional training, and enhanced climate health research capacity and skills through collegial network development and other collaborative projects that emerged from CoP activities. IMPLICATIONS: This paper proposes that WGCCH may serve as an example of an effective strategy to address the lack of opportunities for collaborative engagement and mutual learning between health researchers and practitioners, other disciplines, and the general public. Our experiences and lessons learned provide opportunities to learn from the growing pains and successes of an emerging climate change and health-focused CoP.

RéSUMé: LIEU: Le changement climatique est l'une des plus grandes menaces pour la santé mondiale au 21e siècle et a récemment été déclaré une urgence sanitaire. Le manque de diffusion efficace des données obtenues concernant les risques pour la santé liés au changement climatique, les impacts et les interventions innovantes auprès des professionnels de la santé constitue aujourd'hui l'un des plus grands défis de l'action climatique. INTERVENTION: Pour identifier et combler les lacunes de connaissances communes à la santé et aux changements climatiques, la Coalition canadienne pour la recherche en santé mondiale (CCRSM) a créé un groupe de travail sur les changements climatiques et la santé (WGCCH). WGCCH évolue organiquement vers une communauté de pratiques (CoP) qui vise à élever le niveau de développement de connaissances liant les changements climatiques à la santé et à s'étendre aux domaines mondiaux multi, inter et transdisciplinaires. RéSULTATS: À ce jour, le WGCCH a lancé une série de webinaires réguliers pour diffuser les connaissances d'experts du monde entier sur les liens entre les changements climatiques et la santé, a élaboré de courts exposés sur les impacts des changements climatiques sur les grands défis de santé, a soutenu la formation de jeunes professionnels et a amélioré la capacité et les compétences en matière de recherche en santé climatique à travers le développement d'un réseau universitaire et d'autres projets de collaboration dont ont émergé des activités de la CoP. IMPLICATIONS: Cet article propose que le WGCCH puisse servir d'exemple d'une stratégie efficace pour remédier au manque d'opportunités d'engagement collaboratif et d'apprentissage mutuel entre les chercheurs et les praticiens de la santé, d'autres disciplines et le grand public. Nos expériences et leçons apprises offrent des occasions de tirer des leçons des peines et des succès croissants d'une CoP axée sur le changement climatique et la santé.

Leverage points for sustainability transformation.

Despite substantial focus on sustainability issues in both science and politics, humanity remains on largely unsustainable development trajectories. Partly, this is due to the failure of sustainability science to engage with the root causes of unsustainability. Drawing on ideas by Donella Meadows, we argue that many sustainability interventions target highly tangible, but essentially weak, leverage points (i.e. using interventions that are easy, but have limited potential for transformational change). Thus, there is an urgent need to focus on less obvious but potentially far more powerful areas of intervention. We propose a research agenda inspired by systems thinking that focuses on transformational 'sustainability interventions', centred on three realms of leverage: reconnecting people to nature, restructuring institutions and rethinking how knowledge is created and used in pursuit of sustainability. The notion of leverage points has the potential to act as a boundary object for genuinely transformational sustainability science.