Framing skills for a just transition: An expanded notion of skills ecosystems

• In Event: Building back or building forward better? Redefining TVET in times of crises: international agendas, policy assumptions and policies in action (Part2)

Proposal

To understand the skills needed to support a just transition, we need to understand the changes necessary at multiple analytic levels in the skills system. This approach is focused on the relations between individual skills, collective forms of learning and the horizontal and vertical structures of organizations. Drawing on experience from cases of multiple TVET skills interventions for sustainable futures, the paper illustrates the interplay at different analytical levels, to surface and identify skills for a just transition – skills that are future focused, latent and not yet commonly known by educational institutions. The paper argues that skills for a just transition requires a framing of the idea of skills through the lens of a systemic collective that involves individuals, organisations, as well as symbolic and policy systems, and learning frameworks, which work together to drive regime change and open the lock-ins within existing skills ecosystem.

The paper hence offers a framing of skills ecosystems that explores skills for a just transition as situated within a laminated skills ecosystem. We argue that this conceptual framework offers much potential for guiding sustainable futures research at a practical level, where transformations are needed at niche level and where a social-ecological skills system research is in the lead. This model involves engaging with and mediating activities at the interface between facilitating verticalities (e.g., policies and policy interventions) and horizontal connectivities (e.g., learning networks or local collaborations around skills research) (Hogson and Spours, 2018) and the environmental conditions found in a diversity of contexts.

Drawing on data from skills initiatives for sustainable futures in TVET programmes in South Africa, Malawi and Kenya we do an absence and emergence analysis that illuminates the relational dynamics within the skills ecosystem approach to just transition. Here we draw on Bhaskar (2016) who argued for an adequate non-reductionist account of generative tendencies, structures and mechanisms, and the conditions under which structures can be transformed. We argue that such mechanisms operate at different levels of scale, and an adequate analysis should therefore take the different levels of scale into account for generative dialectical change.

Using this framework, we develop an immanent critique of the limited ‘weak green skills’ models that are currently dominant in TVET responses in South Africa, Malawi and Kenya. We then identify significant absences at different levels of the laminated system and explore practices at other levels of the ecosystem to contribute to building a new orientation to skills ecosystems. We offer this as an intersectional framework for responding to skills research in the context of the climate and environment crisis. Our framework hence re-imagines skills development models beyond market and statist logics, is more inclusive, and focuses on the connection between living, working and learning which enables us to trace and depict the learning processes central to a just transition.

Author

• presha Ramsarup, University of Witwatersrand