TY - JOUR
T1 - Achieving development outcomes by building practical authority in WASH participatory collectives in Melanesia
AU - Shields, Katherine F.
AU - Barrington, Dani J.
AU - Meo, Semisi
AU - Sridharan, Srinivas
AU - Saunders, Stephen G.
AU - Bartram, Jamie
AU - Souter, Regina T.
N1 - Funding Information:
Funding: This work was supported by the Australian Government under the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) Development Research Awards Scheme [project number 201200898].
Funding Information:
Funding: This work was supported by the Australian Government under the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) Development Research Awards Scheme [project number 201200898]. The project was managed by International WaterCentre. The authors would like to thank all the participants involved in this project, as well as local staff from Live & Learn Environmental Education, University of the South Pacific, and Divine Word University. Thanks to Olivia Molden, Lourdes Ginart, and Fiona De Los Rios-McCutcheon for feedback on drafts of this manuscript, and to Katie Meehan for introducing us to the concepts of participatory collectives and practical authority.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022. All Rights Reserved.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - The strength of the ‘enabling environment’ for development is often considered to be one of the key elements in whether development initiatives fail or succeed. Attempts to strengthen the enabling environment have resulted in a series of checklists and frameworks that imagine it largely to be fixed, static, and separated from ‘beneficiaries’. In the Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) sector, there is a preoccupation with fostering an optimal enabling environment that will result naturally in ‘ideal’ and formalised user participation, which will in turn lead to universal access to water and sanitation. In this paper, we challenge this simplistic and linear view of an enabling environment that is perpetuated by checklists and frameworks. We conducted a three-and-a-half-year transdisciplinary participatory action research (PAR) project which sought to foster WASH solutions in impoverished informal settlements in Fiji, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. In a critical reflection on this project, we analyse the ways in which we both perpetuated problematic checklists and worked collaboratively with our participants to reimagine the enabling environment. We show how individuals challenged the expert-beneficiary dichotomy as they built ‘practical authority’ from their peers through taking action. Our study demonstrates that conceptualising the enabling environment as a dynamic ecology of actors, relationships and processes that includes the users of WASH as active participants was essential to supporting progress towards universal WASH access. We argue that working within the politics of development rather than seeking to render problems as technical was crucial to fostering WASH improvements that were determined by residents themselves and supported by stakeholders. Such an inclusive approach is essential to fully leveraging the co-productive possibilities of participation. If development practitioners and scholars are to achieve development outcomes in an equitable and participatory manner, they must shift their conceptualisation of the enabling environment as being a checklist of things ‘out there’ to one where they work to find their place within an ecology of participatory collectives.
AB - The strength of the ‘enabling environment’ for development is often considered to be one of the key elements in whether development initiatives fail or succeed. Attempts to strengthen the enabling environment have resulted in a series of checklists and frameworks that imagine it largely to be fixed, static, and separated from ‘beneficiaries’. In the Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) sector, there is a preoccupation with fostering an optimal enabling environment that will result naturally in ‘ideal’ and formalised user participation, which will in turn lead to universal access to water and sanitation. In this paper, we challenge this simplistic and linear view of an enabling environment that is perpetuated by checklists and frameworks. We conducted a three-and-a-half-year transdisciplinary participatory action research (PAR) project which sought to foster WASH solutions in impoverished informal settlements in Fiji, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. In a critical reflection on this project, we analyse the ways in which we both perpetuated problematic checklists and worked collaboratively with our participants to reimagine the enabling environment. We show how individuals challenged the expert-beneficiary dichotomy as they built ‘practical authority’ from their peers through taking action. Our study demonstrates that conceptualising the enabling environment as a dynamic ecology of actors, relationships and processes that includes the users of WASH as active participants was essential to supporting progress towards universal WASH access. We argue that working within the politics of development rather than seeking to render problems as technical was crucial to fostering WASH improvements that were determined by residents themselves and supported by stakeholders. Such an inclusive approach is essential to fully leveraging the co-productive possibilities of participation. If development practitioners and scholars are to achieve development outcomes in an equitable and participatory manner, they must shift their conceptualisation of the enabling environment as being a checklist of things ‘out there’ to one where they work to find their place within an ecology of participatory collectives.
KW - and Hygiene (WASH)
KW - enabling environment
KW - Melanesia
KW - Participation
KW - participatory action research
KW - practical authority
KW - Sanitation
KW - Water
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85131769959&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85131769959
SN - 1965-0175
VL - 15
SP - 363
EP - 412
JO - Water Alternatives: an interdisciplinary journal on water, politics and development
JF - Water Alternatives: an interdisciplinary journal on water, politics and development
IS - 2
ER -