Community Learning and Sustainability: Practice and Policy. CRLRA Discussion Paper Series.

There are clear signs that community learning is the way to a more sustainable future for Australian communities, especially rural ones. There are also indications that policymakers now recognize that the people who live in communities should play an important role in determining the future of their own communities. Policy must use the best knowledge from research and provide sufficient resources to build community capacity to learn, adapt, and change. That means a policy approach that builds social capital in communities. A learning community is building social capital as it learns, and a community with high levels of social capital will be a learning community. Strategies for building social capital/learning communities include creating opportunities for interaction; developing leadership skills; building ties within and across communities and between public and private institutions; and establishing brokers to build and maintain these ties. Policy that uses and builds social capital in communities and is most likely to produce sustainable outcomes has these features: a degree of program continuity; diversity at the local level; integrity of programs across levels of government and departments; knowledge resources that communities can draw upon; two-way networks between policymakers and communities; and recognition that social capital alone is not enough--policies must also be resourced with human, physical, and financial capital. (Contains 32 references.) (TD)