Recently an impressive collage of chapters was put together by Antonio Augusto Rossoto Ioris under the title of “Environment and Development: Challenges, Policies and Practices” (open access). Led by Daniele Tubino de Souza (former PhD from Brazil, now working with us at Wageningen University), I was part of a team of authors, that wrote a chapter titled: Regenerating the Socio-Ecological Quality of Urban Streams: The Potential of a Social Learning Approach

This chapter seeks to identify potentialities and challenges in using the social learning approach as a framework for the multi-stakeholder interactions involved in initiatives for the regeneration of urban streams in contexts of socio-ecological vulnerability. Te analysis is built on the case study of the Taquara Stream, located in the city of Porto Alegre, in south Brazil. Tis case study comprises a self-organised group of citizens— composed of members of the local community, the public sector and educational institutions—acting to re-establish the socio-ecological quality of the Taquara Stream and watershed, an area largely occupied by informal settlements. Firstly, we contextualise and problematise the issue of urban stream degradation, focusing on the Brazilian context. Secondly, we provide a brief literature review on social learning, and, finally, we describe and discuss the case of the Taquara Stream as an example of a social learning–oriented process to demonstrate the potential contribution and challenges this approach brings within processes for the regeneration of urban streams in vulnerable areas. There are some nice illustrations of the setting in which the research took place. The entire book is open-access. You can find it here:https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-030-55416-3.pdf

I made a separate pdf of our chapter which you find here:

The full reference is:

Souza de, D.T., Grandisoli, E., Jacobi, P.R. and Wals, A.E.J. (2021)Regenerating the Socio-Ecological Quality of Urban Streams: The Potential of a Social Learning Approach. In: Ioris, A.A.R (Ed.) Environment and Development: Challenges, Policies and Practices. Cham: Palgrave-Macmillan, p.67-98.