Innovation Region Sweden

• Älska Skog educational competition (Gothenburg, Sweden)Gothenburg-based educational institute Universeum is running annual design competitions on forest topics for primary school pupils, starting in 2016. Based on various activities in which pupils gain knowledge about forest-related challenges and opportunities as well as forestry, they would design plans to deal with those problems. After a first setup which ended in 2018, an evaluation and potential redesign of the competition was desired. This is where the InnoForESt approach came in to structure and guide the innovation process of this educational programme. The aim of the innovation process was to update the competition programme to contemporary complexities and explore new actor and contributor constellations.At the time of writing, the Innovation Team has organized four workshops of different kinds, differing in distribution and number of stakeholders participating. A first workshop discussed a wide variety of scenarios which took up current topics of sustainability/climate and using forests as a means of integration. This meant a potential broadening of the previous range of topics which revolved specifically around forest management topics. However, this potential broadening was not without risk. Private forestry actors were strongly tied into the previous institutional arrangement of the educational competition and a critical view on climate activities in forests could result in their withdrawal from cooperation. Hence, any scenario that would involve climate change would need to be formulated very carefully.Nevertheless, during a second workshop the Team focused more on climate as a topic and presented the participants with three further developed scenarios fleshing out the contents of climate-focused educational competitions. The choice to intensify work on climate as a topic for the educational programme was reaffirmed by an increased awareness for climate change following the 2018 extreme drought and heatwave, which in turn spurred Greta Thunberg, the Swedish high school student turned global climate champion. Interest of high school students in the problematic surged along with Greta’s impact on global environmental policy and media. Afterwards, the Team planned to present the new direction to the private forestry actors. This was not yet successful, partly because they could not participate in subsequent workshops. In lieu of developments on that front, the Team picked up the further didactical development of the programme and met up with the Universeum in-house pedagogues. They discussed how the eventually chosen climate scenario could be implemented from a didactical perspective.In what has been the last workshop for now the Team convened teachers to discuss the current scenario and hear their opinions on different possibilities regarding the didactical setup of the programme now targeting the older age group of high school students. In InnoForESt terms, the Team has reached far into the prototype development process and is already on the verge of mapping the road ahead. It seems that the governance innovation is heading towards a new content and a new target group.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Social och ekonomisk geografi -- Ekonomisk geografi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Social and Economic Geography -- Economic Geography (hsv//eng)

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