Transcript Putting Practice Theory into Practice: Drought, Climate

Putting Practice Theory into Practice:
Drought, Climate Change, and the
Uncertainty of Water Demand
Dr Alison Browne
Lancaster Environment Centre
[email protected]
Calling all Translators...
• Successful policy = Social science as ‘active
mediator’ and ‘translator’
• However:
– Is translation enough?
– Is business and industry involvement merely a
‘fourth’ discourse?
– Is there room to unveil normative elements of
discourses?
– Argue the need for change?
Overview
• Introducing a new ‘discourse’ into the debate
– that of ‘practice theory’
• Identifying need for resetting policy and
scientific agenda
• Identifying maladaptations in current agendas
• Identifying current research at LEC chiefly the
Adaptation and Resilience in a Changing
Climate project (ARCC-Water)
ARCC-Water
• Applying sociological approach to regional water
resource models (SE UK) sensitive to climate
change
• Identify true uncertainty and sensitivity of water
using practices to climate and other social,
technical and infrastructural changes.
• Social Science Impacts:
– to provide a (sociologically informed) estimate of
future demand
– ‘agitator’ of the assumptions of the physical science
agenda within this project and the water industry.
The Problem of Estimating Demand
• Approaches which focus on average
calculations of demand actually fail to reflect
the different services that water provides, as
well as the distinctive characteristics of the
different practices (gardening, laundering,
bathing etc), in and as part of which water is
consumed in daily life.
The Disconnect between
Supply and Demand
• Agendas which focus on simply interacting
with the public (to reconsider their water use,
to reconsider their use of water efficient
devices etc) simplifies the complex
relationships between the development of
supply and infrastructural options (including
technological change) and the everyday
practices that characterise water demand.
Maladaptation
• Five different types of characteristics
– increasing emissions of greenhouse gases;
– disproportionately burdening the most
vulnerable;
– having high opportunity costs;
– reducing incentives to adapt;
– and increasing path dependencies.
Discourse Coalitions, Saturation and
Institutionalisation
• Discourse Coalitions in the Economic,
Psychological and Engineering Agendas
– signify the importance of intervention in terms of
supply, provision of water technologies and
behavioural change as immediately related to the
valued concept of ‘water’.
Maladaptive Discourse Coalitions
• Are these discourse coalitions actually maladaptive?
• Do they reduce the ‘interventions’ that are legitimised
as adaptive within the space of water resource
management?
• E.g., Legitimising large scale infrastructural change
(desalination, recycled water) and choice based
consumption (water efficient technologies)
• versus
• the efficacy of ‘bringing back the flannel’ i.e., changing
cultural understandings of what it means to be clean,
value of gardens, value of water using services?
Calling all Agitators...
Practicing Practice Theory
• Practice based discourses open up other
alternatives for
– understanding water management
– For conceptualising demand
– For considering a wider understanding of the
concept of ‘intervention’
– For reshaping dominant discourses
– For providing new ways into interpretive
governance regimes that challenge agendas and
discourse coalitions
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Change 20, 210-213 (2010).
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analysis and the institutional void. Policy Sciences 36, 175-195
(2003).
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Consumers, water companies and regulators [Final Report].
(Lancaster University Lancaster, UK, 2008).
• Medd, W. & Shove, E. The sociology of water use. 75 (Lancaster
University Lancaster, UK, 2006).
• Sofoulis, Z. in Creating Value: The Humanities and their Publics. 36th
Annual Symposium of the Australian Academy of the Humanities,
17-18 November 2005, Canberra: AAH. 105-115.
• Throgmorton, J. A. The rhetorics of policy analysis. Policy Sciences
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