My name is Stefan Raubenheimer and this week, I'll take you through some thinking about how systems change and how they change in a particular way. So if we can imagine a system has people and values and cultures. It has things, it has tremendous complexity and we're concerned with it changing in some way to another system make up. Every single system has some kind of carbon footprint. Some kind of emissions footprint, which we'll just call CO2 for the time being and that's a present footprint and we want it to have a significantly lower footprint in the future if we are to combat climate change. So this is what we are concerned with is how you would change the system from this particular system with all its entrenched carbon to a new system, which is substantially lower as a system with a carbon footprint. This is a process and every process has a specific design and this week, we are looking at the subject of process design. We also looking particularly at how we designed our processes in the map program and in a project in South Africa called a Long Term Mitigation Scenarios project. So these were examples and from these examples, we've drawn some lessons for this course, which we would like to share with you. So now systems change in very complex ways. I think we all know that and they change, because of internal behavior or external or exogenous forces. So a thunder storm or a hurricane can change a system or the behavior of people inside the system. We're concerned with the behavior of people inside the system. So for example, the biggest change in human history can perhaps be attributed to the moment where people discovered farming. Some knowledge on their part plus the technology, plus some behavior within the system created a huge change in the human system at that particular time. So we're looking at a particular kind of change where enough people build enough momentum to change the system from within. Not to wait for some external force that changes the system, but to willingly change the system from within. So for that in our maps program, we devised a theory of change, which worked something like this. We would combine, essentially knowledge and people in a certain way and hope that that combination would result in change. Now this sounds very simplistic and for the next few minutes, I'd like to try and unpack for you what we hope to achieve through this particular approach or theory of change. So the first thing is the kind of knowledge that we're talking about. Now you can dump knowledge into a system. You can write a PhD and you can hand it over to powers in a system and maybe they read it and maybe they change the system. But very often, they don't. So the one thing we thought about is how knowledge is produced is as important as the knowledge that is used for the change in the system. So why not get these two elements of our theory of change to combine? And so the first important thing is that we would have to co-produce the knowledge. So the actors in the system who we want to bring about change are also the actors in the building of knowledge and I'll unpack that theory in a little while. So this co-production issue is the first and most important element of what we set out to do. Inside the system, there are a number of players. Let's call them stakeholders or actors. Some of them are from government, some of them are from the private sector, some of them are from civil society. Some are researchers and academics. Some are expert, some are just like you and I, consumers and they all play a complex role within that system. We want representatives or actors change agents from all those parts within the systems to come into this process and help to co-produce new knowledge that characterizes this particular system, as well as understanding this system. So we've seen that there are a number of different actors inside a system and I'll just represent them three. But of course, there could be millions. And we've seen that we want them to co-create knowledge and that our theory of change is that that process of co-creating knowledge will begin to drive the momentum within the system towards change. Now this seems like quite a lot of fuss and bother to change a system from one thing to another, why? The reason is that our systems are heavily dependent, many of them specifically in developed economies, but also in growing, developing economies are heavily dependent on high carbon inputs and outputs. Every time we buy something or run an electrical appliance, we are emitting carbon. So all the actors in some way or another are connected to carbon and so they all have to change and they all have to create this momentum, but people change for various reasons one of which is because of what they learn. And if they learn that change is a great thing has all the good reasons you want it to have, then they build the momentum for change and we discovered through our work that there really are three areas where we need. To shape the knowledge that is co-produced. There are three very significant components or characteristics of the knowledge. The one is that the knowledge has to be legitimate. The second is that the knowledge has to be credible. And the third is that the knowledge has to be salient. Let me try and explain those. In the context of our work, we believe through experience that creating knowledge on its own is not sufficient, but knowledge that has the stamp of legitimacy on it has a much higher chance. Not only of producing the change you want, but also of getting the people into the room that you need for the co-production process. This legitimacy or authorization is usually conferred by the governing body of the system. If the system is your city or your firm or your country, then it is usually government or the board of directors who confer this legitimacy on the entire process. And thus, they confer legitimacy on the knowledge itself. Without that, it's just a PhD or a book. It is just new knowledge and it can be very influential, but not necessarily so and we want to guarantee some higher degree of potential or possibility for the change. Credibility is something that you'll encounter much more in next weeks module when we look at research. Why is knowledge credible? It's credible, because it's seen by everybody in the system to be good evidence of the change. Not just bad evidence or mediocre evidence, but reliable, credible evidence that the change will be the right thing will be the right way to go. And lastly, it's gotta be salient knowledge. What we mean by that is, it's the same as relevant. It's gotta be relevant to the system that these actors are part of. If it is seen by then as irrelevant or focused on another system, then they will not be likely, they'll be unlikely to follow that with momentum towards change. This relevant is really very, very critical. So that is what we would like to do is to create a process that involves actors within a system who co-produce knowledge that is legitimate, credible and salient and we hope that, that will produce change.
