Making sense through stories: participatory narratives as a pathway to local resilience

Human activity in the last 200 years has created a polycrises with globally significant impacts on climate, biodiversity, social equity, and justice. Recognition of limits to economic growth led to efforts to pursue sustainable development but progress is slow, with criticism that goals will not be met through continued growth amid the social complexity that underpins the current crises. New approaches shift the search for solutions to the problematic way we perceive and act within the world, including re-evaluating core values and beliefs contained in narratives which shape our interactions with the world and each other. Narratives are commonly framed as nouns (e.g., the sustainability narrative) but narratives are also a process of continuous coming into being of phenomena into patterns of meaning that shape human behavior, particularly though values and ethics, and as part of the day-to-day, minute-byminute ‘sensemaking’ that precedes action. Narrative approaches are a way of understanding and acting in the domain of complexity, however they are not normative by design, so the oftheard call for the ‘need for new narratives’ imposes conditions on the narrative process that challenges theories of non-linearity and uncertainty in social-ecological systems. Our research will explore the re-localisation of narrative sensemaking as a regenerative approach to the current polycrises Our research seeks to understand the role narratives play as a facilitator or barrier to transition in social ecological systems including understanding the relationship between narratives at different scales, the role of narratives in revealing “the adjacent possible” and creating alternative basins of attraction. During much of their evolution, our narratives have emerged primarily through interaction at the local scale- family/ tribal completion of physical tasks in community, such as hunting, tool-making, or child-care in place (the view from Somewhere). Modernity yields narratives of the highly mobile individual, structuring narratives without limits in virtual realms (the view from Anywhere/Nowhere).