Managing water in an urban context – getting at root causes

Posted on 30 August, 2011 by Karen Delfau

It has been amazing to realize how globally connected our world has become. Population is exploding in cities, with more than half of the growth taking place in cities that have between 100,000 and 500,000 people, according to UN-Habitat. In order to provide food, water, and energy for the inhabitants of these cities, we need to reach farther and farther from local sources.

The discussions at World Water Week in Stockholm focuses on formal and informal settlements, where “informal” has become the industry jargon for slums. The reality is that cities are growing like mad, without the necessary planning and infrastructure to support this explosion. In many parts of the world, especially in the Middle East, revolutions add an additional level of complexity.

I appreciate that global leaders (researchers, policy-makers, and advocates) have gathered to discuss new information and to dialogue on solutions. Each city / region / country has its own specific contextual factors – in water terms this means hydrology, institutional and political arrangements, culture, and resource requirements. I recognize that there are opportunities to look at how problems are being successfully solved and to share knowledge and to network to better support one another in our work.

Stockholm World Water Week 2011: Water in an Urbanizing World

There is growing discussion and dialog around how Business As Usual (BAU) is no longer an acceptable way to move forward. Global inequity, gender inequity, and greed in general has been identified as some of the main issues that will need to be addressed to deviate from the BAU scenario. However, I do not see an overarching vision of urban water management emerging to guide us beyond BAU. We have 10 years of Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM), and evidence supporting it’s emergence in national policies, and increasingly in practice. We have the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and targets that have been identified towards achieving each of the goals.

I argue that we need a more aggressive vision to work towards, or maybe even multiple visions depending on each particular context. What, really, would this look like? How would it smell, how would it sound? What are the values driving it all?

Our whole culture is experiencing a chronic illness, and I am in no way excluded from the sickness. This malady exists at three levels – the personal, the communal, and the global. I’d like to explore the metaphor through the lens of World Water Week, starting here with the personal.

The personal level has to do with ego and the need to feed the ego. I’ve traveled a few thousand kilometers to be at this conference, and I want to feel like I am able to make a contribution so that I can feel worthwhile. My ego wants to be perceived as being important, through feedback on who I am, the work I do, the people I know, and how I present myself. For this purpose I wear a business suit, have smart business cards, speak in acronyms, and ask intelligent and articulate questions during workshop and lecture sessions. How does this help with solving global problems and addressing root causes? Dialog and relationships, building knowledge and understanding is at the root of problem-solving (backed by good data and analysis of course….) Do I need to do a cost-benefit analysis of my participation? Are the ecological footprint, financial, and costs associated with not being with my family worth the benefit of my contribution to this conference and the problems that we are all here working to solve?

Although there are small successes within the water and sanitation sector that are being achieved, the whole picture is not a pretty one. How can we celebrate the small successes without being bowled over by the massive challenges ahead? How can we manage complexity, and where does ego fit in when dealing with complexity, and how do we manage that?

As a community of 2678 people gathering to address global water and sanitation challenges, how do we articulate the value of the gathering. In the language of the water community, how do we put into place and measure outcomes in terms of our monitoring and evaluation. Do the outcomes warrant the economic, carbon and overall resource impacts of our participation? The World Water Week secretariat has organized a robust system of rapporteuring to capture the knowledge generated throughout the sessions. They have been directed to identify two key points / recommendations / learnings coming out of each of the sessions. These points have been consolidated, analyzed and boiled down. Within the framework of the cost benefit analysis, is this a success?

World Water Week 2011 closing plenary

The acknowledgement how our global system is moving towards greater lack of sustainability throughout World Water Week has demonstrated a shift in thinking. We need to deal with virtual water, agricultural land grabs, and the water-energy-climate nexus. We, as a global water community, need to focus on context-specific indicators, incentives, and regulatory frameworks and processes. Does this approach allow us to move away from band-aid solutions towards addressing systemic root causes? Alternatively, should we celebrate the local successes, realizing that baby steps are the only way we can make progress in dealing with complex, ‘wicked’ problems?

Here are the findings (based on my further refinement through my lens):
- Integration needs to be expanded – we need to build partnerships beyond the water sector (into planning, food / agriculture, climate / energy, etc) in a collaborative way that builds benefit-sharing.
- We need to communicate across disciplines and across society as a whole to foster improved engagement and empowerment; we need to articulate knowledge in the water sector (technical, scientific, legal, governance, social, etc) in a way that resonates with common sense. This will help to foster increased hydro-solidarity (is this more jargon?)
- We need to better manage contextual complexities, and somehow at the same time upscale successful efforts.
- Management and leadership needs to focus on the realization of water sensitive cities in a way that addresses the poorest-of-the-poor through recognition of the informal / unplanned / slum areas, where the private sector can see these communities as low-income consumers and develop markets.

One additional priority I would like to bring up is to emphasize is the mechanisms / process for generating and sharing knowledge, communication, empowerment and measuring change, creating feedback mechanisms. This speaks to linking academic research and the academic community with the NGO and UN practitioner community; how do these communities integrate?

Learning and knowledge cycles for improved effectiveness in Integrated Water Management

On a global level, we need a shift of power and priority from economic growth towards serving human needs. This is articulated by the July 2010 UN Declaration of water and sanitation as a human right. The realization of this right needs to be implemented first through legal codification at the international and then national levels in order to give more legal ‘teeth’ to the declaration. Then, resources will need to follow to implement projects on the ground to achieve there rights where they are most needed. Will this paradigm shift happen in time to address the global water and sanitation crisis? Or will the globalization Business As Usual scenario win the race, bringing with it the catastrophic consequences of climate change, nuclear contamination, air and water pollution, social inequity, the list goes on.

How can we as individuals making up a group or community acknowledge and address the systemic challenges in a way that is supportive on personal as well as professional levels? What is the dynamic at play that allows us to step beyond the ego in order to recognize the potentially paralyzing reality of the global water and sanitation crisis? Do we use our egos as a crutch to be able to navigate this arena (or distract ourselves?)

Te Karamu river enhancement – building on success

Posted on 7 August, 2011 by Manuhuia

It’s always great to see how work that we’ve done for clients not only leads to a good outcome for them – but also helps build their capacity. After all – for all groups in our line of work – one of the key outcomes is building the capacity of the group(s) you work with.

We worked with a local Maori clan (hapu) on the East Coast of New Zealand who were concerned about the state of their river. We worked with them to create a management plan – which they called Operation Patiki (Patiki is the Maori word for flounder – a key food species in their river) – which enable them to proactively engage with other stakeholders in the management of the river as well as begin to allow their traditional Maori values to be included with scientific monitoring practices in these management practices – such as the concept of cultural flows.

Since then the clan have gone from strength to strength and the original project has been extended to include three other marae (communities). It’s great to say!! Congratulations guys.

Working in Canberra – Kangaroos in the Federal Capital…

Posted on 2 August, 2011 by Manuhuia

We’ve just completed a small project for AusAID (the Australian Federal government’s international aid agency) and as a result were in Canberra. One of the great (or is it just interesting) things about Canberra is that not too far from the Central Business District – and basically just across the lake from Parliament – you can see Kangaroos just hanging around doing their own thing!

There aren’t too many capital cities in the world where you can see local wildlife (beyond birds and cats etc) just hopping around…literally!!

The new New Zealand Ministry of Science and Innovation

Posted on 27 April, 2011 by Manuhuia

The creation of the new New Zealand Ministry of Science and Innovation is almost complete. The new organization is going to have be the prime source of government policy in the science and innovation sector (previously performed by the Ministry for Research, Science and Technology) as well as the main source of public-good science funding (previously performed by the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology) and the shareholder for the country’s Crown Research Institutes (formerly held by Treasury). Unifying everything like this should help bring about some efficiencies in the operation of the organization, and – you’d hope – in the sector in general in New Zealand. Time will tell…

Intangible Resources and New Ways of Extracting Value: IP and beyond…

Posted on 26 April, 2011 by Manuhuia

Recent years have been witness to a global shift towards knowledge economies. In contrast to industrial or agricultural economies, a knowledge economy is characterized less by its dependence on fixed resources such as land or natural resources and is instead dependent upon more intangible factors such as expertise and intellectual property. A flow on from this is that a knowledge economy is not necessarily an economy of scarcity, where natural resources are depleted as they are used. Instead, in a knowledge economy, use of the underlying resources can actually grow the resource base available to the organization in question – be it a company or a country. An example here is the expertise of a country’s population in a certain sector. So, for example, the more people in a country working in the Information Technology (IT) sector the greater the critical mass of skills and innovation being built in that sector.

This shift is not only occurring in OECD countries. Countries such as India and China are taking full advantage of the global demand for knowledge-based industries. Multi-lateral and bi-lateral aid organizations are cognizant of the advantages for economic development that a shift towards a knowledge economy may have and have thus begun to invest heavily in programs, like the World Bank’s Knowledge for Development (K4D) Program, that can help developing countries achieve this transformation.

One of the key difficulties when dealing with the often intangible resources that are at the base of a knowledge economy is that these resources can be extremely difficult to protect. Intellectual Property is the most obvious example. A robust regulatory environment with appropriate safeguards and regulations is thus an important aspect for the development of an environment conducive to the creation of a knowledge economy. How we do this in terms of a changing international strategic environment – because politics and business are never truly separated – is one of the challenges that firms are having to deal with.

I don’t want to claim that we’re going to answer these issues once and for all but I do want to use this blog as a space to begin to discuss them in an open manner. One if the big issues that the shift to Knowledge Societies might bring about is new forms of ownership and ways to extract value – possibly in a more sustainable manner. We already have options like this available to us – such as limited licensing approaches as opposed to complete ownership of IP. But, interestingly, the rise of open-source software – and the push to monetarize sites like Twitter and others – might mean we’re actually witness to changes in the very way we extract value…

Working in the Knowledge Economy

Posted on 4 April, 2011 by Manuhuia

Welcome to the blog and to our new web site!!!

So…this is my first post on our new blog on our new website…

What I’d like to do on this blog is to explore the work that we’re doing here at Synexe. But in doing this we see ourselves as part of a much broader network of individuals and organizations beginning to increasingly work in the space of this thing we call a Knowledge Society.

What I want to do is use this as a forum to interrogate what it is we mean when we talk about living in a Knowledge Society or being part of the Knowledge Economy.

In doing this I’ll definitely draw on the work that we’re doing in different countries but I’ll be drawing a lot from others as well. What I’m trying to do is create a space to explore both what we’re doing as an organization but also how we fit into broader global shifts around the use of Knowledge.

Often when we talk to people about working in the Knowledge Economy they assume that we’re just talking about IT organizations or new computer applications or, at a stretch, that we’re working in the bio-tech sector. This is a real problem as it automatically limits what it is that people see as constituting the Knowledge Economy. We see ourselves as an organization for which the Knowledge Economy (and the related concept of the Knowledge Society) is our raison d’être.

In the development community academics ‘discovered’ about thirty years ago that institutions mattered in the effective operation of organizations. Then, about five years ago (I don’t think this is exaggerating) people started talking about how people mattered too – that is without good people the best institutions in the world wouldn’t do much. This is the genesis of all the talk you see nowadays about leadership! The piece missing from all of this though is knowledge. Knowledge flows through and around organizations and is used by people to make their organizations work – ideally as effectively as they can. This is where we see ourselves working – helping promote this flow of knowledge and thereby helping people and the organizations within which they work operate more effectively. While not a radical idea it is still an area which many people seem to miss. However, it’s an important part of any organization’s work and something which is keeping us increasingly busy (more on this later!).

Knowledge helps us understand what is working, what’s not working, why things are working or not working and so on… While there tends to be a general agreement that knowledge is important there isn’t as much agreement of how we deal with this issue in a concrete way. I’m not saying that we have the answer – indeed I’d be loath to claim that there is one answer. Instead, I think by working through concrete examples on this blog we’ll begin to come up with firmer ideas of what it is that we’re doing in our Knowledge Societies and how they’re leading to better lives for people.

In doing this though, I don’t plan on just engaging on these high level discussions as the effective use of knowledge crosses through all aspects of our lives. Given that, I hope to explore some lighter issues as well as issues people don’t generally associate with the Knowledge Society. I’ll also talk a bit about who we are, the type of work we do and importantly why we’re doing this kind of work.

I’ll be back soon with more…