4.3.1. Learning Opportunities

Projects were often urged to reconsider the contexts and change some of the planned actions.


### 4.3.2. Reflections on Lessons Learned

These challenges enabled them to review and modify their actions, partnerships and even the goals. They adjusted, for instance, the contents of the training programmes, types of tools and timings and locations of activities to fit the local contexts or unforeseen situation. Many of them carried out modifications more than once.

In some cases, the project team reconsiders the activities with a recognition that they need to take some additional measures to achieve their intended outcomes. The additional measures would be, for instance, the introduction of di fferent tools or skills; the organisation of participants for growing their skills and motivation or the introduction of policies, infrastructure, or education programmes that would enable conditions for behaviour changes.

Such additional measures often required the project team to collaborate di fferently with partners. The case in Armenia shows how project partners, such as the local governmen<sup>t</sup> and parents, shifted their ways to engage with the project from the potential beneficiaries into the collaborators. The water-saving project in Da Nang, Vietnam added new activities of the active learning programmes in collaboration with additional partners, namely schools and kindergartens. Likewise, a few projects engaged with policymakers to deliver policy recommendations out of their actions in search of more substantial support to ensure continued benefits after the completion of the project period. Moreover, participants of a few projects redesigned their group structures during the implementation period to make the best use of the enthusiasm or advanced skills of some of the key persons of the local society in growing the capacities and aspirations of the local participants such as farmers' clubs in Zimbabwe (Box 5). Enthusiastic or skilled "participants" become "trainers", "masters" or "leaders" in the later stage of the project implementation and play crucial roles in creating and spreading the skills they developed, marketing their products for securing their livelihoods and connecting with additional partners. Through these "additional" actions, participants developed their capacities and assumed more essential roles in causing the changes.

### **Box 5.** Case 5: Farmers' Clubs in Zimbabwe.

The project in Zimbabwe formed farmers' groups and established experimental fields where the groups provided knowledge and skills for conservation agriculture, horticulture and small livestock production. From the previous implementation in other areas, the project team identified these means as measures for helping farmers mitigate their impacts on the natural environment and, at the same time, become resilient to external shocks such as flood and droughts, or an economic crisis. In addition to training on production, the project also covered nutrition, sanitation and health and marketing to strengthen farming households and communities in a holistic manner.

The project started amid the currency fluctuation that limited farmers' capacity to purchase necessary farm inputs. Participants saw that they could stabilise their household economy with small additional incomes from these activities. However, the project team and participants gave up one of their planned activities of establishing communal saving as it was challenging to develop and manage it stably due to continuous currency risk. Another unforeseen crisis hit the project when a cholera outbreak occurred in the region. During this crisis, participating farmers moved quickly to visit neighbouring areas to disseminate what they learned about health and sanitation as well as the importance of having stable livelihoods. Through these unforeseen events, the farmers grew their capacity to play a more significant role in the local society in creating resilient living conditions.

Unforeseen situations often hinder the smooth implementation of the project activities as planned. However, they also give them opportunities for the project teams and partners in reconsidering their roles in creating the alternative contexts of living and grow their competencies to more proactively move forward. Furthermore, with more proactive roles and competencies, project teams and partners gain deeper considerations of the purposes—what they are collaborating on, creating alternative contexts of living. Thus, ground-level transitions in the making does not mean that they continuously modify their activity plans toward the pre-determined goals. The purposes of the transitions or the visions of the desired future lifestyles or their contexts continue to evolve.

### **5. Discussion and Conclusions**

Thus far, we have analysed some of the common points learned from the small- and micro-scale collaborative actions which the Sustainable Lifestyles and Education Programme of the One-Planet Network has collaborated on from 2016 to 2019. We have learned that the efforts to achieve sustainable lifestyles are, in a nutshell, collective actions of creating the contexts where local people can achieve more responsible and reliable living. Local initiatives have addressed a wide variety of locally specific challenges, namely, the increasing negative impacts associated with growing consumption, and unstable livelihoods and consumption. These two challenges are deeply entangled, as was shown from the above-cited cases 1 and 2. Thus, most of them needed to aim for responsible and reliable living at the same time. To this end, they visualised the current status of living and the associated impacts as illustrated in cases 2 and 3, introduced physical tools or facilities to better utilise the locally available resources in meeting the day-to-day needs (cases 1, 2, 4) and set up spaces for collaboration where local actors learn from each other (cases 1–5) to create alternative connections between human actors and material objects, or individuals and organisations. However, we have also seen that none of these collective actions went as planned despite detailed preparation. They faced di fficulties in establishing partnerships (cases 1, 4), applying knowledge and skills (cases 1, 3) and unforeseen events caused by political and economic conditions or natural disasters (cases 1, 5). Facing such challenges, local actors modified their plans. In doing so, they gained a deeper consideration of the drivers of their unsustainable conditions, what kind of alternatives they envision and what roles they can play in their e fforts to achieve them. In other words, local actors co-create competencies and the meaning of (un)sustainable lifestyles in collaborative spaces.

The above lessons indicate that we would need to reconsider the meanings and conditions of systemic changes that enable sustainable lifestyles. Sustainable lifestyles at the local level will require changes to the systems enabling and constraining the local living contexts. However, such systemic changes are not realised only by replacing a few of the parts or elements to "make it work with less waste" or to "teach people to make a wise choice." We have seen that, for instance, visualisation of the negative impacts of living and introduction of the tools or facilities to enable people to reduce energy, water or waste may work when local actors play active roles in such visualisation or introduction/operation of the tools. The systems [11,12,44] or entanglements [15,16] where our lifestyles are situated is not about engineering elements of materials and tools that would potentially contribute to meeting our needs with "reduced negative impacts". They comprise materials and tools, knowledge and skills to utilise them and meanings or aspirations of people in creating positive relations with knowledge, skills, tools and materials. Likewise, systemic changes are not about replacing some of its parts but are the process where actors explore the potentials of alternative ways of living, and the roles they can play in pursuit of such alternatives. The transition to sustainable lifestyles is not a direct and one-time shift from current unsustainable patterns to pre-defined sustainable patterns. A change in lifestyles needs systemic changes which do not take place somewhere distant from individuals or groups of people but arise as the growth of skills, tools, intentions, competences and aspirations through the collective e fforts in response to locally specific challenges. It is more of a collaborative and continuous exploration [54–56,59,70] into the locally specific meaning of (un)sustainable living conditions and creation of competences that connect people and people or people and knowledge, skills, tools and materials in di fferent ways.

With the above points in mind, we would also need to reconsider the ways in which governments, business and civil society can support or promote the shift in lifestyles. A broad range of policy measures and business models are already tested and are contributing to the uptake of more sustainable lifestyles. The business sector is, for example, providing information on the negative impacts associated with the production and use of specific goods and services so that consumers can make wiser choices or introduce products or services that enable consumers to meet their needs with fewer negative impacts. Governments are supporting such measures through, for instance, o ffering economic incentives, setting up standards of goods and services, criteria for information provision or providing certificates [71]. Such policies could potentially be more e ffective when they can encourage proactive interpretation and adaptation by local actors toward their collective e fforts in addressing particular issues of the local living conditions. By way of an illustration, the business sector can set up a "laboratory" type of collaborative space together with local businesses or citizens' groups for developing and delivering innovative goods or services that reduce negative impacts and at the same time generating income opportunities for the local society [72,73]. By doing so, they do not only contribute to responsible and reliable living but also enlarge the prospects for further innovations driven by the local actors.

Moreover, we should also pay attention to the dynamic natures of innovations of lifestyles and living contexts in the making, instead of trying to make a one-time shift to the pre-determined goal. Monitoring and evaluation of the progress of activities "as planned" is necessary but not su fficient for supporting dynamic collaboration. Monitoring activities can be counter-productive when they are done to make sure the 100% achievements of the planned objectives, since they may kill the chances

for the participants of learning from the reality to develop their competencies and to generate their own unique meaning of sustainable living. To support the exploration of the local actors, we—as governments, civil society actors or researchers—would need to accompany them in responding to unforeseen challenges and eventually creating their competencies for and meanings of sustainable living. Recently, Developmental Evaluation has gained traction with a similar line of thinking [74–76]. We would further need to elaborate such innovative ways of supporting the ground-level collaborative actions, taking account of the dynamics of the conditions of activities, roles of the stakeholders and the goals of the initiatives.

This paper aims to propose a deeper understanding of how people engage in the "systemic changes" of lifestyles, building on the research on lifestyles that focus on how lifestyles are entangled in the systems of provision comprising various elements. The work draws on the results of the work undertaken as part of the SLE Programme. The analysis is, therefore, post-hoc and was developed from discussions regarding the results and the commonalities that were found between projects that were very culturally and geographically diverse. This poses two specific limitations: (a) the analytical approach used by this paper was not integrated into the projects and the project implementers did not consider this specific approach when implementing their projects, and (b) the analysis here does not pay su fficient attention to the pathways of the projects and participants after their initial period. In order to deepen understanding of the transition to sustainable lifestyles and the ways in which stakeholders interact with each other and alter practices, it would be necessary to improve our ways of working with ground-level innovations, integrating this approach into project planning and collaborating for longer years. As the future development of the Global South will be critical to whether humanity is able to avoid the worst e ffects of climate change, a greater understanding of the means by which we can learn to live well within planetary boundaries will be needed.

More than 30 years have passed since international society recognised the necessity to shape more sustainable lifestyles. A multitude of trials for shifting lifestyles exist globally and aim for alternative ways of achieving wellbeing with fewer resources and energy, giving more and more insight into the need to and possibilities of shaping alternative ways of living. However, we need to bear in mind that the potentials of such trials are not limited to their achievements of pre-determined goals, such as reduced material or energy use, through the one-shot actions of tweaking one or two elements of lifestyles. Instead, they need to be fostered as inseparable steps of endless co-creation of new meanings of alternative ways of living and competence to realise them. We, thus, need to continue our exploration to better learning from and collaborating with these ground-level innovations.

**Author Contributions:** The concept and structure of this article was developed jointly by the authors. A.W. is the lead author, and developed the initial draft, to which S.G. added case studies. Final development of the paper was then conducted jointly by the authors. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** The development of the paper is supported by the Policy Design and Evaluation to Ensure Sustainable Consumption and Production Patterns in Asian Region (PECoP-Asia) project funded by the Environmental Research and Technology Development Fund, Japan.

**Acknowledgments:** The authors are thankful for the implementers of the initiatives under the Sustainable Lifestyles and Education Programme of the One-Planet Network (10-Year Framework of Programmes on Sustainable Consumption and Production Patterns).

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors have been involved in the processes of evaluating and supporting the 24 projects under the Sustainable Lifestyles and Education Programme and the selection of case studies cited in the paper.
