Exploring multi-stakeholder learning: Pathways to sustainable livestock futures in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia and Tanzania

There are a wealth of modelling and collaboration tools to support sustainable agricultural and livestock development and transformation. Yet, users struggle to apply the tools to their multi-faceted experience and knowledge. This thesis therefore observes and critically explores how social learning can support meaningful knowledge sharing between diverse stakeholders and with decision support tools so that the knowledge produced by using the decision support tool is useful, relevant and applicable. To do so, the thesis uses a case study of embedding a decision support tool in a social learning process for exploring options for sustainable livestock production in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia and Tanzania. Observing and analysing workshop discussions and outputs, complemented by semi-structured interviews with workshop participants, it explores how the design and facilitation of the workshop activities supported knowledge sharing and learning. It conceptualises the structural elements of social learning processes, the design and content, as structured boundary objects and found that they enable collaboration and facilitate and mediate the sharing of perspectives through developing shared vocabulary, making perspectives explicit and providing participants with some authorship. It then applies an analytical framework using the lens of constructive conflict to assess the facilitation of a social learning process, the learning dialogues and how they were facilitated, focusing on disagreements. Framing disagreements as conflict episodes and exploring the influences of outside and inside context as well as interpersonal conflict dynamics revealed how conflict opens up and closes down opportunities for learning. Taken together, the thesis provides a rigorous and structured approach, using the lenses of boundary objects and a constructive conflict, to understanding how the structure and facilitation design elements of a social learning process work together that provide enabling conditions for bridging knowledge boundaries and facilitating learning.