Abstract
Taking the first steps towards learning to cope with both the threat and the actuality of disasters is a great challenge. Resilience and adaptation to climate change indicate processes of flexibility and adjustment. The range of adaptations open to individuals and by extension collectives will be limited in many ways. One important limiting dynamic is associated with capacity to learn, and the depth or superficiality of any learning. This includes the relative capacity individuals hold to deal with the challenges to normality that disasters bring.Central to the argument of experience of learning as influencing learning outcomes is the degree to which learning opens space for reflection. Having the time, space and opportunity for reflection is more likely to allow the learner to undergo deeper shifts in values and associated behaviour - so called transformational learning and that this opens important space for learning to live with disaster risk and loss. This provides a framework with which to identify and assess TL and its drivers, rather than explain how it might be carried out. Study populations were identified to represent a specific social context for learning:
1. The Community Emergency Response Team (CERT). This group provides formal training courses for local actors at risk to become community emergency response teams.
2. Listos. A less formal learning programme aimed at Spanish speakers in Santa Barbara, centred on personal and family preparedness.
3. UK based humanitarian NGO practitioners whose responsibility lies with enacting policy change within their organisations through monitoring and evaluation and learning roles.
This thesis explores these different learning contexts, testing the hypothesis that learning outcomes expressed through value and behavioural change are linked to the experience of learning - who learning is shared with, what is being learned and how this is reinforced.
| Date of Award | 2018 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Mark Pelling (Supervisor) & Daanish Mustafa (Supervisor) |