A human actor model as a conceptual orientation in interdisciplinary research for sustainable development

Pursuing the normative goal of sustainable development is necessarily bound to the values held by the actors involved, and to these actors as agents of change. The outcomes of development efforts and interventions depend on actors’ actions and reactions, which are largely determined by these actors’ agency. The questions of how actors are conceptualised in development-oriented research and to what extent the resulting concept is shared beyond the social science community are thus of fundamental importance. Current livelihood models in development-oriented research fail to address agency; strategies of action and, consequently, change and innovation in action largely remain black boxes. In this article we propose a general human actor model that can serve as a tool for communication, reflection, and orientation in development-oriented research. It explicitly builds on existing theoretical foundations and ontologies and comprises four nested components: (1) action as the dynamic interplay between activity, means, and meaning, (2) strategy of action as a combination of actions, (3) dynamic conditions of action, to which activities and means are exposed, and (4) institutions, in which meanings of action are embedded. Application of the proposed model in interdisciplinary research for sustainable development has shown that the model can be concretised for specific actor categories, and therefore has a high heuristic potential regarding concrete inter- and transdisciplinary research questions. The model can trigger theoretical innovation and, most importantly, it can be used to promote reflexivity and unravel and share ethical positions in development-oriented research

Features of successful syndrome mitigation : enhancing resilience and empowering the vulnerable in East Africa

This paper examines how knowledge-based interventions improve the quality of life in communities where they are implemented. It draws on case studies of three interventions implemented as Partnership Actions to Mitigate Syndromes (PAMS) within the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) North-South programme. The case studies consist of a qualitative evaluation based on experience, knowledge and expertise gained through participants’ observations, as well as relevant documents and reports. The concepts of 1) syndrome mitigation; 2) participation and empowerment; and 3) vulnerability and resilience are used as assessment indicators to demonstrate the levels of and differences in contributions by and among the respective interventions. The assessment reveals that although each of the three projects contributed to syndrome mitigation in its respective context, there are marked disparities in the level of individual achievement that are influenced by the nature of problems of unsustainability, technological requirements, and the implementation costs of the preferred intervention