Community-driven informal adult environmental learning: Using theory as a lens to identify steps toward concientización

ICPA - ICPA 2026

Welcome to the 2026 International Conference on Perception and Action (ICPA). This year, we meet in Omaha, Nebraska, bringing the international ecological psychology community together in a setting that reflects a growing culture of research and innovation.ICPA brings together scholars from around the world who study perception and action as inseparable, mutually constraining processes grounded in organism–environment relations. The program features work spanning affordances, perceptual learning, coordination and control, development, social interaction, ecological design, and methodological innovation.The conference is designed to support sustained dialogue across theoretical, empirical, and applied perspectives—welcoming diverse viewpoints and participants from across institutions, disciplines, and countries. We invite you to join us for a week of scientific exchange and community building as we continue to advance ecological approaches to understanding behavior in real-world contexts.

Wait… whats a Community of Practice?

“Learning is not merely the acquisition of knowledge by individuals. It is a process of social participation.” A slightly bastardised…

Why Do We Call It Participatory Science? | Smithsonian Environmental Research Center

How can citizen science reduce psychological distance to science? Insights from three projects in contested environmental contexts

Citizen science (CS) is a participatory mode of knowledge production, enabling non-scientific actors to contribute to and sometimes contest scientific agendas and interpretations, making it a way to bridge science and society. This paper examines how that potential unfolds by analysing the individual perspectives of citizen scientists through the lens of Psychological Distance to Science (PSYDISC). Drawing on three case studies of contested environmental CS, we identify which contextual aspects of CS shape citizen scientists' experiences of social, spatial, temporal, or hypothetical distance to relevant science, and how these experiences may relate to trust. Our findings underscore the role of science communication as both a channel for dissemination, and as a constitutive element of participatory research; crucial for reducing psychological distance and enabling socially robust knowledge production, especially in contested, policy-relevant science settings.

Connecting Research with Community - Civic Innovation Lab

Welcome to Civic Innovation Lab, where we drive social impact through collaborative solutions and empower communities. Join us in fostering sustainable development, co-creating initiatives, and advancing inclusive governance for a better future.

Home - Coastal Watershed Institute

Protecting marine and terrestrial ecosystems through scientific research and local community, place-based partnerships

Assessing nature's contributions to people

Recognizing culture, and diverse sources of knowledge, can improve assessments , A major challenge today and into the future is to maintain or enhance beneficial contributions of nature to a good quality of life for all people. This is among the key motivations of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), a joint global effort by governments, academia, and civil society to assess and promote knowledge of Earth's biodiversity and ecosystems and their contribution to human societies in order to inform policy formulation. One of the more recent key elements of the IPBES conceptual framework ( 1 ) is the notion of nature's contributions to people (NCP), which builds on the ecosystem service concept popularized by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) ( 2 ). But as we detail below, NCP as defined and put into practice in IPBES differs from earlier work in several important ways. First, the NCP approach recognizes the central and pervasive role that culture plays in defining all links between people and nature. Second, use of NCP elevates, emphasizes, and operationalizes the role of indigenous and local knowledge in understanding nature's contribution to people.

Home | Hypha

We cultivate collective growth and meaningful livelihoods through learning and building technologies together.

Human Adults and LLMs as Scientists: Who Benefits from Active Exploration?

A long-standing finding in the causal learning literature is that adults struggle to identify conjunctive causal rules, where an effect requires the simultaneous presence of multiple causes, while...

Civic Action

Commonly, researchers have looked for civic life in a distinct sector in which they assume that voluntary associations will cultivate special skills and virtues. Gathering together many challenges to this approach, and using ethnographic cases of housing advocacy and youth civic engagement projects, the authors reconceptualize “the civic” as civic action and show how patterned scene styles shape it. Doing so reveals patterns of action in complex organizations that may span institutional sectors. The authors show how researchers can locate scene styles, and with an extensive literature review, they portray several common styles and suggest that different civic styles often lead to different outcomes.

Local Lab | New_ Public

Helping local communities create flourishing digital spaces

An ecological perspective to master the complexities of the digital economy

Economic and social interactions are shifting to digital platforms which grow into vast ecosystems where user engagement creates value for members while ecosystem orchestrators harvest massive revenue. The digital ecosystem business model succeeds by adeptly navigating fast-changing environments, including new technologies and volatile demands, through dynamic innovation in a decentralized decision-making setting. This renders digital platform ecosystems complex adaptive systems. Recognizing that natural ecosystems are a prime example of complex adaptive systems, we propose a systematic hierarchical framework for describing and understanding digital ecosystems, rooted in ecology and evolution. Our framework compares digital ecosystems hosted by societies to natural ecosystems embedded in biomes, products to species, and technologies and elements of business strategy to the genetic makeup of a species. As digital platforms face heightened scrutiny about their socio-economic power and societal value, our approach contributes to the development of deeper understanding and sustainable governance of the digital economy.