Do Elinor Ostroms principles of successful institutions illuminate the challenges to participation in groundwater governance in South Africa? What limits are there to using Ostrom's principles to analyse groundwater governance challenged in South Africa?

Elinor Ostrom's research has opened up a field of study into locally developed institutions for commons governance and has successfully disproved the notion that it is impossible for individuals to address collective problems cooperatively (Ostrom, 1993:110). South Africa has a semi-arid country with scarce water resources. Multiple diverse users such as farmers, private citizens, companies, and municipalities draw groundwater. Groundwater governance involves water allocation, regulation and management through socially acceptable institutions. This relationship between government and society is fundamentally a political one (Rogers, Hall, 2003). A primary concern of the new draft National Groundwater Strategy is governance and enabling the participatory processes involved (Department of Water and Sanitation, 2016). By drawing on Ostrom's principles of successful institutions to analyze groundwater governance challenges in South Africa it is evident that while her principles help to focus inquiry and largely reflect the literature on challenges to groundwater governance in South Africa. That said, Ostrom's principles may present an image of what aspects successful institutions tend to have, but these do not help us to develop a comprehensive understanding of the South African social and economic challenges to participatory institutional development. In South Africa the challenges of inequality and marginalization, and resulting social dynamics, as well as the issues of government capacity to be both a central actor and facilitative actor, and when each role is appropriate, are significant challenges to the sustainable governance of groundwater resources. The question of how to address these challenges must be addressed by government and all stakeholders if local participation is to be encouraged in South Africa

Participatory design and participatory development: a comparative review

This paper examines literature in the twin domains of participatory interactive systems design and participatory approaches to international development. As interactive systems are increasingly promoted as a possible means of achieving international development goals, designers generally agree that participatory design approaches should be applied. However, review of the literature reveals that these two different traditions have more complex relationships, and questions must be asked about: the aims of participation, the forms of participation that are being advocated, and the skills and strategies required of practitioners. The findings suggest that successful integration of participatory interactive systems design into development will require careful reflection on the nature of development and the approaches adopted.</p

Using the Co-design Process to Build Non-designer Ability in Making Visual Thinking Tools

This research is a case study of using co-design as a way of assisting the capacity building process for an Indianapolis-based community organizer. The community organizer seeks to develop a visual thinking tool for enhancing her engagement with community participants. Community organizers face a wide array of complicated challenges, addressing these kinds of challenges and social issues calls for innovative and inclusive approaches to community problem solving. The author hopes this case study will showcase itself as an example of leveraging design thinking and visual thinking to support and equip more first-line workers who are non-designers to do their community jobs with a more creative problem-solving approach

User-intermediaries and the local embedding of low carbon technologies

This article draws on three theoretical fields, innovation intermediaries, socio-technical transitions and domestication studies to develop a process perspective of how user-side intermediary organisations seek to locally embed low carbon technologies. The term local embedding is increasingly used by transition researchers in a variety of ways. The first contribution of this paper is to explore and substantiate the concept of local embedding as the process of integrating technologies into local contexts of use. Intermediary organisations are conceived as contributing to local embedding where they facilitate, configure and broker change towards configurations that work. Nonetheless, understanding how these key intermediary processes relate as well as the influence of system dynamics on the work intermediaries undertake is still largely uncharted territory. The paper’s second contribution is a process perspective on the agency of intermediary organisations in local embedding. The resulting perspective offers insights into the agency of user-side intermediaries and later phases of transition processes

When skillful participation becomes design : making clothes together

This dissertation investigates the intersection and fluidity of design, use and participation when participatory design (PD) extends its focus to new forms, spaces and community contexts. Whereas early PD aimed to enable user participation in the design of their workplaces, contemporary PD experiences new challenges by expanding to new contexts. These contexts are, for instance, “makerspaces” for “peer production”, dedicated to placing participants with varying knowledge and skill into dialogue while providing spaces, tools, materials, and guidance. When extending PD to such spaces, the roles of the designer/user become blurred, because over time they move along a spectrum of acts of design and use. I investigated this challenge by creating three exemplary sites for designing and making clothes together. By designing together I refer to enabling the garment user to participate in the design and production process through offering local spaces and means for shared making activities. I blend PD, do-it-yourself, and do-it-together activities with concepts from peer production, to explore how participants (designer and user) with different skills are “making clothes together”. Simultaneously, I sensitize the participants to sustainable alternatives to the global mass-production system in fashion, which is traditionally based on fast, cheap and high-volume production in low-labor-cost countries. I carried out three “research through design” experiments, creating different kinds of peer production makerspace settings in Finland, Germany and Italy. These spaces were distinctive in the social diversity of their participants; themes and engagement methods, and in their focus on clothing. This focus offered the participants a familiar repertoire of technical equipment (e.g. household sewing machines) and was thus beneficial for observing the blurring of roles between designer and user. Each experiment consisted of a series of participatory making workshops, each lasting three to six hours. During a total of about 60 workshops with hundreds of participants, I collected rich materials such as design diary notes, observations, photographs, and audio recordings of qualitative interviews. The experiments posed specific questions that led me to emergent conceptualizations of “stuff” (i.e. tools, materials, spaces) and “skills”. These stuff and skills were analyzed in terms of their evolving interdependence and their relation to participation and the blurring of roles. The dissertation is structured as the presentation of the main findings of four peer-reviewed journal articles and an introductory chapter. I outline five main contributions to extended PD research and practice. First, my research illustrated the fluid spectrum that spans design and use, through interrelating conceptions from literature with a substantial amount of materials documented through practice. Second, through systematic analysis of stuff and skills, the research explored the social and material considerations of design and “infrastructuring”. Third, I documented how the participants’ (designer and user) roles changed and how participation is a development process over time. The participants’ roles changed from categories such as beginner to advanced experts and allowed associations between those with different kinds of material engagements from operating to managing to designing. This was seen, for instance, by participants taking over responsibilities and becoming workshop facilitators; or a local visitor who turned out to be a sewing machine repair expert. Fourth, I propose that in the given context, participation can be understood as skillful acts of use. This perspective helped me recognize and document changes in the participants’ roles and types of participation when framed as acts of use, determined by skills. Finally, the developed categories documented the relation between participation and skill, by highlighting interesting dynamics emerging around skills development, materialized through evolving and changing stuff (i.e. social and material infrastructuring). For example, skilled participants developed or brought their own tools for facilitation. This further elucidated how skills are not static but interrelated, and that specific skills are required and can be developed through different social, material and designerly aspects, attuned to such extended PD contexts. The results, therefore, contribute to extended PD research by adding nuances extracted from practice, to highlight how skillful participation changes over time. This suggests a reconceptualization and broadening of traditional PD or co-design perspectives of roles. For practice, the perspective of framing participation as skillful acts of use allows designers to support participants’ skills (development) during participation. Further, my research identified that a focus on user or designer roles is limiting in such contexts. It advocates designing spaces for infrastructuring, which allow changes in participation and anticipate unexpected use: spaces that nourish skills development and encourage the sharing of responsibilities among very different participants which can potentially be sustained over time

Towards integrated island management: lessons from Lau, Malaita, for the implementation of a national approach to resource management in Solomon Islands: final report

Solomon Islands has recently developed substantial policy aiming to support inshore fisheries management, conservation, climate change adaptation and ecosystem approaches to resource management. A large body of experience in community based approaches to management has developed but “upscaling” and particularly the implementation of nation-wide approaches has received little attention so far. With the emerging challenges posed by climate change and the need for ecosystem wide and integrated approaches attracting serious donor attention, a national debate on the most effective approaches to implementation is urgently needed. This report discusses potential implementation of “a cost-effective and integrated approach to resource management that is consistent with national policy and needs” based on a review of current policy and institutional structures and examination of a recent case study from Lau, Malaita using stakeholder, transaction and financial cost analyses

Our Constitution, Our Vision, Our SDGs

Uganda's development planning is guided by the long term vision-Vision 2040, by which the country aspires to see a transformed Society from a peasant to a modern and prosperous country within 30 years. Formulation of the vision involved nation-wide consultation of various stakeholders (government, parliament, civil society organisations, business, labour, professionals, academia, opinion leaders, etc), which coincided with the first round of global Post2015 consultations. Among many indicators, the country envisages per capita income of USD 9,500, real GDP growth rate of more than 8 percent. This will be achieved through strategic policy reforms and shifts, such as review and restructuring of the service delivery system, front-loading investments in infrastructures, and exploring innovative financing mechanisms, in partnership with development partners. The holistic nature of this vision and the wide consultative process along with it provided a key milestone and back bone for localization of agenda 2030