Emotion and Adaptation

Abstract Information is a source of power in the planning process. This article begins by assessing five perspectives of the planner's use of information: those of the technician, the incremental pragmatist, the liberal advocate, the structuralist, and the “progressive.” Then several types of misinformation (inevitable or unnecessary, ad hoc or systematic) are distinguished in a reformulation of bounded rationality in planning, and practical responses by planning staff are identified. The role and ethics of planners acting as sources of misinformation are considered. In practice planners work in the face of power manifest as the social and political (mis)-man-agement of citizens' knowledge, consent, trust, and attention. Seeking to enable planners to anticipate and counteract sources of misinformation threatening public serving, democratic planning processes, the article clarifies a practical and politically sensitive form of “progressive” planning practice.

Planning in the Face of Power.

The State of Food and Agriculture

Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism

Getting to YES. Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In

This research report presents the findings of the first phase of the action-research project "Models for implementing multiple-use water supply systems for enhanced land and water productivity, rural livelihoods and gender equity." Multipleuse water services, or "mus" in short, is a participatory, integrated and poverty-reduction focused approach in poor rural and peri-urban areas, which takes people's multiple water needs as a starting point for providing integrated services, moving beyond the conventional sectoral barriers of the domestic and productive sectors.

https://www.iwmi.cgiar.org/Publications/IWMI_Research_Reports/PDF/pub098/RR98.pdf

Multiple-use water services to advance the millennium development goals.

Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) has often been interpreted and implemented in a way that is only really suited to countries with the most developed water infrastructures and management capacities. While sympathetic to many of the criticisms levelled at the IWRM concept and recognising the often disappointing levels of adoption, this paper and the series of papers it introduces identify some alternative ways forward in a developmental context that place more emphasis on the practical in-finding solutions to water scarcity. A range of lighter, more pragmatic and context-adapted approaches, strategies and entry points are illustrated with examples from projects and initiatives in mainly 'developing' countries. The authors argue that a more service-orientated (WASH, irrigation and ecosystem services), locally rooted and balanced approach to IWRM that better matches contexts and capacities should build on such strategies, in addition to the necessary but long-term policy reforms and river basin institution-building at higher levels. Examples in this set of papers not only show that the 'lighter', more opportunistic and incremental approach has potential as well as limitations but also await wider piloting and adoption.

/pdf/finding-practical-approaches-to-integrated-water-resources-vbvc1bbvug.pdf

Finding Practical Approaches to Integrated Water Resources Management.

Behind headline successes in providing first-time access to water lie a number of pressing challenges to the dominant approach to rural water supply in developing countries, namely community management following a demand-responsive approach. These challenges manifest themselves in poor performance of service providers, high rates of hardware failure, and very low levels of service. The papers in this special issue argue that tackling these challenges requires a shift in emphasis in rural water supply in developing countries: away from a de-facto focus on the provision of hardware for first-time access towards the proper use of installed hardware as the basis for universal access to rural water services. The outline of the main actions required to achieve this shift are becoming clearer. Chief amongst these are the professionalisation of community management and/or provision of direct support to community service providers; adoption of a wider range of service delivery models than community management alone; and addressing the sustainable financing of all costs with a particular focus on financing capital maintenance (asset management) and direct support costs. This introductory paper provides an overview of these issues and a guide to the other articles, which demonstrate these points.

Trends in Rural Water Supply: Towards a Service Delivery Approach

1. Community-Based Water Law and Water Resources Management Reform in Developing Countries: Rationale, Contents and Key Messages 2. Understanding Legal Pluralism in Water and Land Rights: Lessons from Africa and Asia 3. Community Priorities for Water Rights: Some Conjectures on Assumptions, Principles and Programmes 4. Dispossession at the Interface of Community-Based Water Law and Permit Systems 5. Issues in Reforming Informal Water Economies of Low-Income Countries: Examples from India and Elsewhere 6. Legal Pluralism and the Politics of Inclusion, Recognition and Contestation of Local Water Rights in the Andes 7. Water Rights and Rules, and Management in Spate Irrigation Systems in Eritrea, Yemen and Pakistan 8. Local Institutions for Wetland Management in Ethiopia: Sustainability and State Intervention 9. Indigenous Systems of Conflict Resolution in Oromia, Ethiopia 10. Kenya's New Water Law: An Analysis of the Implications of Kenya's Water Act, 2002 for the Rural Poor 11. Coping with History and Hydrology: How Kenya's Settlement and Land Tenure Patterns Shape Contemporary Water Rights and Gender Relations in Water 12. Irrigation Management and Poverty Dynamics: Case Study of the Nyando Basin in Western Kenya 13. If Government Failed, How Are We to Succeed? The Importance of History and Context in Present-Day Irrigation Reform in Malawi 14. A Legal-Infrastructural Framework for Catchment Apportionment 15. Intersections of Law, Human Rights and Water Management in Zimbabwe: Implications for Rural Livelihoods.

/pdf/community-based-water-law-and-water-resource-management-10qfap3uhu.pdf

Community-Based Water Law and Water Resource Management Reform in Developing Countries

Around the world, hundreds of millions of men, women and children live in extreme poverty. Their poverty is multi-faceted: besides lacking money, they have limited access to education, suffer from poor health, have little political weight, and are vulnerable to all manner of external shocks like droughts and economic crises. In addition they have access to very limited resources, natural, physical or financial: in particular they typically suffer from limited access to water – both of safe quality and adequate quantity. A great many of these poor men and women, in urban, rural and peri-urban settings base their livelihoods on ‘informal activities’ – small-scale cropping, livestock keeping, agro-processing and other micro-enterprises. In many of these activities an adequate water supply is a crucial enabling resource: as a resource used in or necessary for the activity itself; as a provider of time (by reducing time spent collecting water); or as a key element in improved health that enables people to do work. Taken together then, water supplies provided to households, and particularly the poorest (and women, who are found disproportionately amongst the poorest), have a huge potential to impact on poverty. This symposium is about such water supplies, about how to provide them and how to ensure that their potential to impact on poverty can be fully realised.

John Butterworth

Papers

Multiple-use water services to advance the millennium development goals.

Finding Practical Approaches to Integrated Water Resources Management.

Trends in Rural Water Supply: Towards a Service Delivery Approach

Community-Based Water Law and Water Resource Management Reform in Developing Countries

Poverty and productive uses of water at the household level