Please contribute ideas, experience and analysis to this discussion on institutions and change processes in river basins.
Some BFPs have found that institutions hold the key to development that can either improve the benefit people derive from water, or inhibit equitable or rapid change. About the only thing we can be sure of is that change is required to help address increasing pressures on food and water systems from a growing population.
Your ideas, please...
I am going off the internet for a few days in KZN, but wanted to share some comments from emailing with Simon on a proposed BFP book, that led to this blog. Hopefully the loss of some context will not be too much of a problem.
ReplyDeleteFIRST COMMENT, ON 25 PAGE PRECIS OF PROPOSED BOOK, RELATIVE TO CHAPTER ON CHANGE:
I see this chapter is described in slightly different ways in different places, here emphasizing change processes and strategies for its promotion, in others focused more on the institutional arrangements per se. It is clear from the summaries of the chapters on the 10 basins that none of them is likely to present any kind of credible institutional analysis. Of the analytical chapters only chapters 13 on water availability and 16 on resilience discuss institutional issues as having a major role; it seems missing in others even though I would argue that water-poverty relationships, water productivity outcomes, responses to climate change (to name 3) are to a very high degree mediated by the institutional framework broadly defined.
For me this is a bit of a dilemma. From my perspective (bias, okay), I would design the entire book around analyses of opportunities and constraints to promoting change, and this would necessarily involve much more analysis of social organization, political power relationships, information sharing, market functioning, informal and formal social and institutional relationships, etc. It is only by understanding these that one can identify effective intervention points, potential champions, promoters, partners, and sources of opposition, and therefore potential pathways to the CPWF having real “impacts”. To me, the book would have been more interesting, and potentially have more impact, if it were designed along this theme.
On the assumption, however, that it is too late to make such a radical suggestion for the book, here is what I propose if it works out as possible: I would be happy to work with Boru (bringing his knowledge of the change/impact methodologies and literature) and Vosti (I assume this is Steve? I do not know him well, but I assume he brings an institutional economics/market perspective which is valuable and complementary) to prepare a chapter that offers an overall model of impact-oriented institutional analysis, illustrated using material from some of the other substantive chapters. For example, if we think we can reduce poverty in parts of the Limpopo, Nile and Volta by improving water productivity of rainfed agriculture through a set of interventions involving harvesting and application of rainfall plus better agronomic practices and better market access, what are the institutional impediments at local, sub-basin, national, basin levels to doing this, and what are the possible intervention points and strategies? [This example combines several themes—poverty, productivity—for what I imagine will emerge in all 3 basins as possible interventions.]
This example is of micro-level if you will interventions, that can be done through local institutions (although done on a large scale they have macro-level implications). Others might be larger-scale, for example construction of large multi-purpose storage infrastructure; but on transboundary basins the complexity goes beyond the usual social and environmental issues to highly sensitive political ones—on which there is a growing literature.
I am struggling with the limit on number of charaters here.
Doug
SECOND COMMENT:
ReplyDeleteIn Water and Food One (Molden, ed. 2007), which came out very well overall, I felt that somehow we did not succeed in integrating across chapters very well (I say “we” since I was lead author of the institutions chapter so am part of the team so to speak); and therefore maybe the social-institutional dimensions underlying some of the chapters did not emerge as well as they could have. And I think my main point was that the current outline may not yield as much in terms of intervention strategies, though yes, I agree it may help further our understanding of relationships (except as described in the outlines, will the institutional dimensions get established in the basin chapters or in the more conceptual ones?).
There has not been much quantitative analysis to support the institutional dimensions of basin or global water-productivity-poverty-environment systems because in my own opinion, the nature of the beast does not lend itself well to this. Here I am reflecting a divide among social scientists—some quantitatively-oriented (some sociologists, most economists) might not agree with my statement, but others of us from a more social anthropology )and some sociologists) background tend to emphasize relationships and processes that are not easily captured in numbers (possibly reflecting that as a science our discipline is less well developed—but possibly not this either).
THIRD AND FINAL ONE
ReplyDeleteI found using the impact pathway model very problematic, both in the Limpopo Basin Project, and in my evaluation of MUS. My problem with it is its underlying linear logic, that somehow we can trace “pathways”, roads, causal lines, whatever, from “a,” an output such as an idea or a technology, to “z” a final “impact” or change that occurs as a result of the adoption of the innovation, through a defined path (for example researcherapplied researcherextension personcommunity leader willing to try an innovationscaling out as neighbors adopt, though I realize this is a caricature). And your points are also valid on its additional drawbacks. I found Boru quite open to these issues, of course; but ultimately I was not surprised to learn he comes from an agricultural engineering background and worked at IRRI (right?) in its ag engineering program. For improved versions of technologies—a better rice thresher or better maize seed—the model does help to describe paths that innovations sometimes really do take. But in complex basin systems, where what is probably needed is not a better seed or drip kit, but major changes in policies, institutions, power relations, etc it is not so useful. In the Limpopo project we proposed “intervention packages” and as far as I know, Amy and her group have been pursuing this concept in a way that should be a source of interesting lessons.
I was attracted by the MUS use of “learning alliances” but did not find a lot of evidence of the full LA model happening anywhere (though there is evidence that in some countries and internationally, getting a range of stakeholders with different interests involved with the researchers led to real impacts in some places). Nevertheless, as a variation on the “innovation systems” idea, it is a useful model and I have been trying to sell it here in Kenya for its irrigation and drainage sector—hoping to get them thinking out of the box instead of thinking they just need to put more money into KARI.
To belabor my main point some emails ago: the full answers to the 3 questions you posed, pasted just below, will necessarily bring us back to the institutional/economic/political/social social dimensions.
Where IS the water going in basins, who uses it...what hazards are presented?
How well it is used ...by the RANGE of beneficiaries [that is a difficult chapter]
What are the observed impacts on poverty [or livelihoods, better]...
And here is an hypothesis: Drop for drop, the most productive use of water (kg of not Rand/drop) may be by the poor woman growing tomatoes and veggies in her backyard garden using tiny amounts of household gray water, bits of rain, etc.
Doug