Resilience In Groundwater Supply Systems: integrating resource-based approaches with agency, behaviour and choice in West Africa (RIGGS)

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Access to safe and reliable water supplies is a key goal across most of Africa. Groundwater reserves increasingly play a critical role in achieving this as part of resilient water supply services. Yet, risks of contamination and over-abstraction threaten to undermine the resilience of this supply. The rapidly rising trend for privately-developed wells and boreholes raises concerns about the vulnerability of water supplies to natural or man-made environmental shocks. However, the social, political and economic processes underpinning this are poorly articulated. The potential scale of the situation is particularly marked in Nigeria where the use of boreholes has increased exponentially since 1999 (from 10% of the population to 38% in 2015), with most other forms of water supply, notably piped tap water, falling.Developing effective groundwater management approaches that build the resilience of communities is challenging, not least given the range of different actors involved, their competing interests and demands, and variations in the hydrogeological environment. Insights from resilience studies in social science emphasise how the resilience of ecological resources to shocks and change is critically linked to the adaptive capacity of social systems and their agents. Choices made now have long-lasting effects, yet these choices are little understood. Understanding the choices made by consumers, drillers and policy actors requires a strong interdisciplinary dimension and argues for new perspectives as to how the resilience of communities and societies might be built.The project brings together a unique interdisciplinary collaboration between academics in the fields of economic geography, psychology, hydrogeology and journalism studies from the UK and Nigeria. The project will develop and test an innovative framework for understanding the interplay between environmental resources, social systems and behavioural choices affecting the resilience of groundwater supplies. It will do this through developing a mixed-methods approach that will be trialled in three pilot study areas in Nigeria. This will enable the study team to consider the role groundwater resources can play in building the resilience of communities to future potential environmental shocks; the risks posed by private abstraction trends to the resilience of communities to sudden or slow-onset environmental hazards; the role of different media in framing communities' understanding of groundwater resources, and individuals' and organisations' perceptions, choices and behaviour; and how perceptions, choice, behaviour and agency can influence (policy) actions to reduce vulnerabilities and enhance resilience. The project builds on the published interests of the World Bank, UNICEF, WaterAid and other key actors in Nigeria and Africa. It will build links with these, and other, organisations to ensure that the project is relevant to their interests and can inform their future thinking. To maximise the effectiveness of the project we are working closely with the leading network operating in this area - the Rural Water Supply Network (RWSN). This includes participation in the quinquennial RWSN Forum, a survey of RWSN members and webinars hosted by RWSN. These actions will extend the reach of the project and set a context for the findings of the pilot actions. Overall, the project will strengthen knowledge for building the resilience of groundwater resources in the face of environmental hazards, through integrating resource-based approaches with a stronger appreciation of the influence of human agency. It will inform our understanding of the underlying drivers of disaster risk, how actions are incentivised in different contexts, the role of communications and media in influencing the choices and decisions being taken and the role played by multi-level governance actors in framing these choices through their policy actions.