Six members of the ARUA Water CoE presented at the Garden Route Interface and Networking (GRIN) meeting held in Sedgefield from 11th to 13th October 2022. This networking meeting is held annually and provides a forum for researchers and practitioners interested in understanding and managing (navigating) social-ecological systems and their complex interactions and feedbacks. The Adaptive Systemic Approach framing the UKRI-funded Unlocking resilient benefits from African water resources (RESBEN) project, was given its own session on Day 2 of the meeting.
On Day 1 of the meeting, Timotheo Ndimbo, a research assistant from the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, presented his work on the Great Ruaha Catchment Water Committee in the Great Ruaha River Catchment. This Water Committee is a River Basin Organisation which is recognised as a space to enable participatory governance in water resources management. His work uses Gaventa’s Power Cube Framework and Arnstein Ladder of Participation to analyse aspects of stakeholders’ power and participation in the Water Committee decision making processes. His analysis suggests there are challenges to achieve full participation in the Committee and his work continues to explore options for strengthening stakeholder engagement.
In the ASA-RESBEN Session, Professor Tally Palmer presented an overview of how the Adaptive Systemic Approach emerged from more than a decade of collaborative research. She introduced the audience to the three overarching theories of complex social-ecology systems (CSES), transdisciplinarity and transformative social learning, showed how the project is implemented in seven African Countries, and connected the overview to the subsequent presentation.
Margaret Wolff presented a sliver of the Adaptive Planning Process workshop which forms an integral part of the Adaptive Systemic Approach. She emphasised the role of facilitation in the workshops and the key lesson of the importance of the use of home language to enable all participants in the workshop to participant more easily.
Dr Matthew Weaver unpacked the use of the Value Creation Framework by the RESBEN project to illustrate the value for participants as they engaged in the social learning spaces in the project. The creation of different types of value (for example immediate, potential, applied, realised, transformative and strategic ) for participants impacts their ability to make the difference they care to make through their work. In addition, value is evidence of current and future impact related to their engagements, working lives and the information they share with colleagues and stakeholders. This value is often overlooked by traditional ‘tick box’ monitoring and evaluation techniques.
Dr Rebecka Henriksson discussed the significance of integration between disciplines (e.g. natural science and social science), methods and data sources, and between academic and non-academic knowledge, across the project and in particular stressed the importance within a CSES and sustainability science framing. To this end, Dr Henriksson and colleagues have developed a tool to assist researchers and students to consider how they might be able to enhance the SES integration and transdisciplinarity in research and project design.
Finally in the session Dr Ana Porroche-Escudero challenged the meeting to think about the continuing ‘divide’ between funding and research in the Global North and Global South. She spoke about the past, existing and continuing institutional structural inequalities that persist in an African context and between Africa and the Global North. She argued that if research led by southern research institutions is to remain an investment priority from the global north, there is a need to (a) recognise the asymmetrical North/South funding dynamics guiding research and funding and, (b) develop enabling support mechanisms to overcome and/or mitigate the real impact of compounding structural inequalities.