RegenerART: How community eco-art is facilitating disaster recovery, regeneration and risk reduction through transformative learning

The increased risk of natural disasters due to accelerating global climate change is making it urgent and imperative to develop more effective disaster risk reduction, recovery and regenerating approaches. These approaches vary in their capacity to address the causes and impacts of harms, and commonly the relationships between humans and nature are ignored. While it has been shown that art-based programs successfully facilitate disaster recovery and adaptive capacity building, the underlying processes and specific outcomes remain largely unknown. To address this gap, we partnered with the Tumut Art Society to explore RegenerART, the eco-art program they developed to support the communities in their Snowy Valleys region recovering from and regenerating after the 2019-20 bushfires in New South Wales, Australia. Utilizing social-ecological systems theory and symbolic interactionism as philosophical lenses, we investigated the experiences and perspectives of workshop participants using constructivist grounded theory and ethnography. During two field visits conducted two years after the bushfires, we participated in two one-day art workshops, conducted episodic interviews with five art workshop participants and analyzed a 2021 documentary made about the program. We systematically analyzed the data using grounded theory and narrative analysis. The emergent grounded theory identifies that engaging in community-eco art workshops strongly facilitated transformative learning. The healings and transformations that occurred led to community members (re)connecting with their true selves, other community members and nature. (Re)connecting facilitated development of a deeper and enduring sense of community and place attachment, greater individual and collective self-efficacy, and improved wellbeing. The grounded theory provides insights into the processes by which these learnings occurred and how these processes can be facilitated. These findings have potential transferability to similar sites and to building individual and social adaptive capacities. We also offer insights into implications of these findings for embedding eco-art programs ongoingly into community life.