| 1. |
- Blomkvist, Pär, 1961-, et al.
(författare)
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Entrepreneurship and alignment work in the Swedish water and sanitation sector
- 2023
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Ingår i: Technology in society. - : Elsevier BV. - 0160-791X .- 1879-3274. ; 74
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Water and sewage (WS) systems are, like most grid based infrastructural systems, often centralised and hierarchical and the end user has almost no possibility to influence the technical standards, business models or system architecture. The preferred method for connecting new areas to the grid are underground water pipes and gravity flow for sewage. Thus, the WS system is “tightly coupled”. It is hard to change and conservative in its system culture, exhibiting a strong “momentum” or “path dependence”. In this article we investigate an unusual case in the development of WS-systems. As a rule, WS-systems, as most infrastructural systems, develop gradually through incremental innovations, and system owners/utilities traditionally build their systems “from the inside out”. In our case, we investigate a situation where the end users took the initiative to connect a residential area, Aspvik, part of the municipality of Värmdö, outside Stockholm, Sweden, to the municipal grid and thus expand the WS-system, not from the inside out, but from the outside in. Furthermore, we highlight another unusual feature: the role of a resident that acted as the “entrepreneur” in this process of WS-system expansion. The entrepreneur had unique trust building abilities in the local community, which the regime actor (the WS utility), could not match. Historically, inventor-entrepreneurs have been common, acting as “system builders” in the establishment phase of new infrastructural systems. However, entrepreneurs outside the regime are not common in the WS sector. Although atypical in mature WS systems in developed countries, these types of local initiatives or hybrid solutions are common in developing countries. In this article, we argue that there are lessons to be learnt from our case, when dealing with system expansion processes both inside and outside the Global North.
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| 2. |
- Buytaert, Wouter, et al.
(författare)
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Citizen science in hydrology and water resources : opportunities for knowledge generation , ecosystem service management , and sustainable development
- 2014
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Ingår i: Frontiers in Earth Science. - : Frontiers Media SA. - 2296-6463. ; 2:October, s. 1-21
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The participation of the general public in the research design, data collection and interpretation process together with scientists is often referred to as citizen science. While citizen science itself has existed since the start of scientific practice, developments in sensing technology, data processing and visualization, and communication of ideas and results, are creating a wide range of new opportunities for public participation in scientific research. This paper reviews the state of citizen science in a hydrological context and explores the potential of citizen science to complement more traditional ways of scientific data collection and knowledge generation for hydrological sciences and water resources management. Although hydrological data collection often involves advanced technology, the advent of robust, cheap, and low-maintenance sensing equipment provides unprecedented opportunities for data collection in a citizen science context. These data have a significant potential to create new hydrological knowledge, especially in relation to the characterization of process heterogeneity, remote regions, and human impacts on the water cycle. However, the nature and quality of data collected in citizen science experiments is potentially very different from those of traditional monitoring networks. This poses challenges in terms of their processing, interpretation, and use, especially with regard to assimilation of traditional knowledge, the quantification of uncertainties, and their role in decision support. It also requires care in designing citizen science projects such that the generated data complement optimally other available knowledge. Lastly, using 4 case studies from remote mountain regions we reflect on the challenges and opportunities in the integration of hydrologically-oriented citizen science in water resources management, the role of scientific knowledge in the decision-making process, and the potential contestation to established community institutions posed by co-generation of new knowledge.
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| 3. |
- Clark, Julian, et al.
(författare)
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Water as "Time-Substance" : The Hydrosocialities of Climate Change in Nepal
- 2017
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Ingår i: Annals of the Association of American Geographers. - : Informa UK Limited. - 2469-4452. ; 4452:July
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article develops a novel theoretical framework to explain how water's situatedness relates to its political agency. Recent posthuman scholarship emphasizes these qualities but, surprisingly, no sustained analysis has been undertaken of this interrelation. Here we do so by theorizing water as a “time-substance” to reposition human hydrological struggles (including those exacerbated by climate change) around the topologies and temporalities rather than the spatialities of water. This innovative approach opens up new areas of geographical enquiry based on hydrosocial forms, hydrosocial transformations, and hydrosocial information (collectively referred to here as hydrosocialities). We contend that hydrosocialities enable the tracing of human–water relations that transcend times and scales and the matricial categories of subject and object to overcome the situated–agential binary of water. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in Mustang, Nepal, this conceptual framework is deployed to examine hydrosocialities in two remote mountain communities. We show hydrosocialities that comprise diverse water knowledge practices constituted from multiple points of proximity between the social and the hydrological in space and time. In turn, this conceptual framework underscores the importance of boundary objects in mediating water's situated–agential qualities. The article concludes that consequently boundary objects can play a crucial role in producing new practical hydrosocial politics of climate change mitigation and adaptation.
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| 4. |
- Karpouzoglou, Timon, Dr, 1984-, et al.
(författare)
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Analysing water provision in the critical interface of formal and informal urban water regimes
- 2023
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Ingår i: Water international. - : Taylor & Francis. - 0250-8060 .- 1941-1707.
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- Science and technology studies and urban political ecology have made important contributions to the understanding of water provision in the Global South. In this article we develop insights from these fields with the aim to understand the blurring boundaries of urban water regimes and their power relations mediated by actors, institutions and technology. Furthermore, we explore how urban water regimes can form a critical interface which is a form of institutional–actor space where formal and informal water regimes encounter each other through conflict and cooperation.
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| 5. |
- Lawhon, Mary, et al.
(författare)
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Making heterogeneous infrastructure futures in and beyond the global south
- 2023
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Ingår i: Futures. - : Elsevier Ltd. - 0016-3287 .- 1873-6378. ; 154
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Infrastructure has never been a single thing, understood in a universal way. Yet, there has long been a broad overarching orthodox approach in which ‘experts’ create replicable, stable, large, networked systems to control nature and ensure regular, predictable flows of people, materials and information. Within this orthodoxy, infrastructure is narrated as good, contributing to economic and social development. In this paper, we identify environmental, economic, political and social pressures challenging this approach to infrastructure, pushing for it to be understood, enacted and constructed differently. We then show how actors have responded to these pressures through examples of flood mitigation, corridor development and sanitation. Our cases are not pure instances of a new approach. Instead, we use them to tease out emergent efforts (and struggles) to rework infrastructure, to make it more fluid, flexible, sustainable and responsive to democratic demands, as well as to more clearly link infrastructure with well-being. These examples reinforce the importance of differentiating infrastructure, including considering how particular approaches imagine and contribute to sustainability and well-being. In this context, we point towards broader ideas of how infrastructure might be reimagined and remade in the future, and the difficult politics of such new visions.
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| 6. |
- Nilsson, David, 1968-, et al.
(författare)
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Is on-property heat and greywater recovery a sustainable option? : A quantitative and qualitative assessment up to 2050
- 2023
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Ingår i: Energy Policy. - : Elsevier Ltd. - 0301-4215 .- 1873-6777. ; 182
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article deals with ongoing attempts to recover heat and greywater at property level, based on an in-depth study of Stockholm, Sweden. We explore different socio-technical development paths from now up until 2050 using a novel combination of on-property technology case-studies, actor studies and system-level scenario evaluation, based on Artificial Neural Networks modelling. Our results show that the more conservative scenarios work in favour of large-scale actors while the more radical scenarios benefit the property owners. However, in the radical scenarios we identify disruptive effects on a system level due to disturbance on wastewater treatment plants, where incoming wastewater can be critically low for up to 120 days per year. At the same time, net energy savings are relatively modest (7.5% of heat demand) and economic gains for property owners small or uncertain. Current policies at EU and national level around energy-efficient buildings risk being counter-productive in cases when they push property owners to install wastewater heat recovery technology which, in places like Stockholm, can create suboptimal outcomes at the system level.
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