In this course you will become familiar with the ideas of the water-energy-food nexus and transdisciplinary thinking. You will learn to see your community or country as a complex social-ecological system and to describe its water, energy and food metabolism in the form of a pattern, as well as to map the categories of social actors. We will provide you with the tools to measure the nexus elements and to analyze them in a coherent way across scales and dimensions of analysis. In this way, your quantitative analysis will become useful for informed decision-making. You will be able to detect and quantify dependence on non-renewable resources and externalization of environmental problems to other societies and ecosystems (a popular ‘solution’ in the western world). Practical case studies, from both developed and developing countries, will help you evaluate the state-of-play of a given community or country and to evaluate possible solutions. Last but not least, you will learn to see pressing social-ecological issues, such as energy poverty, water scarcity and inequity, from a radically different perspective, and to question everything you’ve been told so far. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Part of the results and case studies presented have been developed within two projects: MAGIC and PARTICIPIA. However, the course does not reflect the views of the funding institutions or of the project partners as a whole, and the case studies were presented purely with an educational and illustrative purpose.
A field example
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来自 Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona 的课程
Sustainability of Social-Ecological Systems: the Nexus between Water, Energy and Food
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Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
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从本节课中
Module 8. Time for "something completely different": from the Cartesian dream to quantitative story-telling via evidence based policy
We are ending the course with something a bit different (thanks to our guest lecturer Andrea Saltelli). This week we leave quantitative assessments behind, and take some time to reflect upon why it is important to do analyses in a different way. We will introduce the concepts of post-normal science and quantitative story-telling – this will allow you to think deeply about how you frame your analyses in the future.
与讲师见面
Mario GiampietroICREA Research Professor
Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA)
Andrea SaltelliGuest researcher
Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA)
Tarik SerranoPost-Doc Researcher
Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA)
[MUSIC]
Hello, welcome back.
This is the second lesson of week eight.
And in this lesson, we will talk about the epistemological challenges of
participation and we will look at an example from the field.
So the goal of this session is to understand the challenge of
bringing together different stakeholders and different types of expertise.
In the next ten minutes,
we will explain the challenges linked to participatory integrated assessments.
And look at one example of this.
So, the issue of multiple perceptions can be described in the following way.
If you have a given system,
each different observer will perceive this system in different ways.
So for example, if you take an ecologist, they will establish what are the relevant
attributes according to the ecologist perspectives to observe about the system.
These attributes will be encoded in order to produce a representation of the system,
which we can think of as a model.
And then this model can be used to make predictions about
the behavior of the system.
So these predictions are decoded to see if they match with what is actually observed.
So the same process can be repeated for an economist.
And they will define the relevant attributes in a different way.
And therefore, build a different model of the same system.
Same thing for a biologist, for an engineer, for a sociologist.
So what we have is that different representations are made
of the same system and they may or may not overlap.
Now this is important when talking about social-ecological
systems because as we have seen through the course,
there are different representations we can build of this types of systems.
So, for example, we can make an End Use Matrix, a Metabolic Pathways, or
we can make an Externalization Matrix or an Environmental Loading Matrix.
Now, when putting together all of these different representations, what we have is
a discussion of the feasibility, viability and desirability domain.
So it's important to know these representations, if they overlap or not,
if they can talk to each other or if they are non-equivalence to each other
because this matters in terms of decision making.
>> Hello.
Think about the elephant.
The elephant is a different thing to different people.
Think about blind people trying to define the elephant.
One could touch the belly and say it's a big fleshy thing.
One could touch the tusks and say it's a long curved thing.
One could touch the mouth and say it's a long floppy thing.
And another one could touch the ears and say it's papery, it's big and it flips.
So different people see the elephant differently.
But then for many years the development professionals had been talking
about a stable development.
And they have mainly been talking about the principle of economy growth.
They have been talking about achieving social objectives.
They have been talking about ecological conservation.
Talking about achieving the ecological objectives.
But maybe it's about time that we look at
the complexity within sustainable development.
Look at that complexity that's brought about by scale.
The local scale, the national scale, and the global scale.
We should also look at the complexity that brought up by boundary factors.
These factors include politics.
They include political views.
They include peace and tranquility.
They also include how institutions and administration is arranged.
Perhaps we should be talking about sustainable communities instead of talking
about sustainable development.
And that is what I would suggest.
The whole mark of sustainable communities are self determining,
sustainable communities have freedom of speech,association and of choice.
In sustainable communities,
there are multiple stakeholders with multiple interests.
And these interests may actually be conflicting.
So we need to look at this interest and see at which scale this interest come.
This interest could come from the capital where the policy is made.
It could come from the field where the policy is implemented and
that interaction is very important.
We need to be bold enough to ask important questions like whose resource belongs to?
We need to ask who is claiming the resource that is an input development.
Who has access to this resource?
Who benefits from this resource?
Who makes decisions about this resource?
And that I highlight because I think who makes decisions about a resource and
the use of that resource is very important.
Who should own this resource?
I have as that, about what taught in Botswana.
And I have found that different stakeholders give different answers,
to who owns it and should have access to it.
So, you have several types of stakeholders.
You have stakeholders that are vulnerable.
These are stakeholders who have high interest in the resource but
has no power of decision making.
You also have stakeholders that are key to the development process.
These are stakeholders who have high interest in the resources and
even have high decision making powers.
You also have stakeholders who are low priorities.
These are stakeholders who have neither.
We have low interest and low power in the resources.
And then you have the critical and perhaps dangerous stakeholders who have very high
power but have no interest in the resource.
So when I create my study to find out about all these stakeholder interactions,
I found the invisible hand which came mainly from the role of experts in
academics.
In general, and they have enormous strength in that they either direct or
create narratives for the powerful players.
That dominance is fueled by the power of knowledge,
and the definition and exclusive tendencies.
The donors hand is not so
invisible, they openly provide financial support for powerful governments.
What do we need to do about it?
We need to check our support motives.
Should the powerful country support the powerful?
The powerful supporting the powerful takes away potential for
the self determination that we're talking about.
First of all,
it has been found to bring about a breakdown of local government system.
It also brings about gross under development.
It also takes down or brings a loss of local skills.
So what needs to happen is for us to create a platform for bargaining and
negotiating access to sustainable livelihoods and
local investments in order to form sustainable communities.
Thank you very much.
>> So how we put together different perceptions matters in
terms of what type of science we want to do.
So one can have an elite type of science where the experts decide what is
relevant information and how to put it together.
Or a more participatory type of science, like in the example we saw
in talk about the sustainable communities.
So if we want to aim for a more participatory science,
there are different steps that needs to be taken in this process.
We have, there are three different types of quality checks that we have to do.
In order to ensure that the different perceptions are taken into account.
So the first step is a quality check on the issue definition, and
in this step what is important is to look at what are the relevant story-tellings.
And whether they have been included in the analysis.
So how many of these perceptions of different stakeholders
that we have are part of the definition of the problem.
The second step is a quality check of the integrated analysis so
on the method of analysis itself.
And in this step what we check is whether the attributes that are being considered
are pertinent and whether the integrated assessments that we are doing when we
put together all these different attributes is congruent.
And the third is the quality check on the deliberative process.
So in this third step what we do is to look at whether the process itself
of putting together the different stakeholders and
putting together the different attributes in the integrated assessment was fair.
And we check whether this process leads to an effective deliberation or
if it, for example they get into some inconsistencies or
controversies and may now proceed forward.
So if there are problems at any of these three steps
of the quality assessment, what we have to do is to go back to the previous step.
And so these three steps have to be understood as an iterative process,
as something that maybe has to be repeated many times over.
And the difference that they feed into each other.
