Water Safety Planning Equity Study: Synthesis Report of Four Case Studies in Asia

Prepared by the Institute for Sustainable Futures, UTS for the World Health Organisatio

Community Engagement on Water Futures: Using creative processes, appreciative inquiry and art to bring communities’ views to life

New approaches to engaging the community are needed to navigate the increasing complexity of planning urban water systems in the face of uncertain climatic, social, economic and political futures. This paper shares an innovative approach developed in collaboration between the Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney, and the NSW Government’s Metropolitan Water Directorate. Our approach integrated futures visioning, Appreciative Inquiry and creative processes to engage the community on their vision for the future. Participants’ visions were also informed by technical information about the urban water system. The approach produced three “futures scenarios”, comprising annotated artworks and accompanying narrative statement

Participation and power dynamics between international non-governmental organisations and local partners: A rural water case study in Indonesia

© 2019 Water Alternatives Association. Community-Based Management (CBM) is an important part of Indonesia's goal of universal access to water. However, approaches to CBM tend to neglect the impact of power relationships between community-based organisations (CBOs) and their external donor partners on CBO management capacity. This paper explores the power dynamics between a CBO and their donor partner, the international NGO Engineers Without Borders Australia (EWB), in a rural water supply project in Tenganan, Indonesia. A diffracted power frame was used to analyse the response of CBO power to EWB's participatory approach. The approach was sensitised to power, gave primacy to the CBO's vision, used local assets, and had a flexible timeline. The CBO's power was evident in the strength of its vision, its resistance to government involvement, the occasional rejection of technical advice from EWB, and its increased confidence in its capacity to manage Tenganan's water supply. The findings reinforce the political nature of participation, with implications for approaches to establishing CBM in Indonesia and elsewhere. Strengthened outcomes in rural water supply are likely to result from greater self-reflection by external partners regarding their own positionality, coupled with a focus on strategies for maintaining and enhancing the power of CBOs

Beyond a token effort: Gender transformative climate change action in the Pacific

Gender inequality, unequal power relations and discrimination are barriers that often prevent women, girls and people of diverse sexual and gender identities from equal representation and participation in many aspects of society. Addressing these issues in climate change programming is crucial, given the ways in which climate change can amplify existing gender inequalities (CEDAW 2018). Pacific Island Countries (PICs) are already experiencing the impacts of climate change. Although the diverse cultures of the Pacific have adapted to severe weather over the millennia, the broad range and severity of climate change impacts require new interventions to ensure lives and access to basic rights are protected. All sectors and all levels of society—from local to national, rural to urban—require new ways of working to adapt to climate change. These new ways need to ensure that marginalised segments of society, including women, girls and boys, people of diverse sexual and gender identities, people with disability and indigenous people, are considered. ‘Gender transformative climate change action’ seeks to address some of these issues, by transforming underlying norms and behaviours, relations, systems and structures to ensure gender equality