Transforming with a Soft Touch: Comparing Four Learning Networks

In this paper, we consider how learning networks build capacity for system transformation. We define learning networks as inter-organizational voluntary collaboratives that nurture professional expertise and describe their potential to catalyse systemic change by disrupting old habits, fostering new relationships, and providing freedom to experiment. We conducted a parallel study of four learning networks, which vary in age since founding from 2 to 25 years, applying three exploratory questions across our cases. We conclude by considering how learning networks can foster transformative capacity within social-ecological systems when they are designed and facilitated with a soft touch so that network members in different sites have the freedom to define their place and purpose within their system, as well as their role in bringing about a desired transformation. We suggest that system transformation is not just the sum of similar efforts at different sites and scales or a least common denominator between them but is emergent from interaction between the partially shared understandings of actors within and between sites, and across network scales. A well-designed network is a learning system that encompasses these multiple perspectives, and good netweaving mediates different ways of system knowing without collapsing them into one perspective. Copyright (C) 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.