Collective agency in socio-ecological systems evaluated through theatre-based research.

Current challenges, like sustainable development, are increasing in their complexity, hence it’s fundamental educating citizens to cope with these “super complex problems”, known also as wicked problems (Alford and Head, 2017), which have individual and collective consequences not only in rational decision making terms, but also in managing the emotions connected to them, i.e., sense of uncertainty and eco anxiety (Clayton, 2020). The agency could have a key role in shaping the polis. According to Sokol and the capability agency includes agency freedom, otherwise, it could have also a negative impact on integral wellbeing and development, i.e., those related to fulfilling obligations (Sokol et al. 2015). This kind of freedom in communities and socio ecological systems coul dn’t be individually exercisable (Elmqvist, 2019), for this reason, collective agency could be essential in coping with changes, defining needs, interests and functionings to achieve, and to participate in the achievement process, developing active citizen ship (Sen, 1985). In the scientific literature, there is not a great amount of research concerning the collective agency's assessment, hence more research needs to be done on it (Valdivia Quidel, 2023; Yount, 2019; Pers, 2012). According to a recent case s tudy conducted in Scotland in youth studies, collective agency could be improved through forum
theatre from Teatro del Oprimido by Augusto Boal yet could be implemented by comparing different levels of collective agency development between the beginning an d end of the project (Ward et al. 2022; Boal, 2005). For this reason, this proposal aims to reflect on the key role of collective agency to co create the world through collective and transformative learning with theatre based research, using initial, in i tinere, and final assessments addressed to participants and the audience. Teatro del Oprimido has already been used to assess transformative learning in participants (Romano, 2016, 2018), but this research extends the reflection to collective learning in a socio ecological systemic view, with the idea that the "learning 4" of Bateson's theory of logical levels of learning, is possible and desirable as developmental learning (Bateson, 2003).