Philosophy and Transformative Learning: Lessons in Natural Resource Management from Cordillera Communities (original) (raw)

2013, Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture

O 115 of both intellectual achievements. One may then notice not only the "sociologization" or the "historicizing" of ontology, epistemology, and ethics, but likewise, "the philosophization of the sciences of man." This paper aims to demonstrate one avenue through which philosophizing may be animated and made relevant: metatheoretical reflection on social theory and on the application of social-scientific knowledge to development work. In this paper, the objects of philosophical reflection are the important lessons learned from a participatory action research program conducted by the Cordillera Studies Center of UP Baguio in Sagada, Mountain Province, in Northern Luzon, Philippines, which ran from March 1997 to February 2001. 6 This research program used the Community Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) approach. In what follows, concepts of philosophy are made to re-describe "second order" concepts of theory, as well as "first order" concepts of community-based natural resource management research, planning, testing, implementation, and monitoring. We wish to demonstrate how lessons learned in the field provide the material for reconceptualization in social ontology and the philosophy of social science. Accounts of the CBNRM projects repeatedly use the term "learning" to describe the process of understanding and transformative action that the participants underwent. In this paper, we assert that the process of learning itself in the generation of usable knowledge and best practices involves the continual reexamination of the theoretical and philosophical presuppositions of research and transformative action. The "mutual nourishment" of social-scientific activity and philosophical reflection, which this paper endeavors to instantiate, is reflected in the way the paper itself is structured: the voices of the authors, whose initials are indicated at the beginning of every portion each of them contributed, alternate in the shared task of articulation.