Water stressed cities: individual choice, access to water and pathways to resilience in sub-Saharan Africa

建立对水危机的复原力被认为是当今人类社会面临的主要挑战之一。在撒哈拉以南非洲(SSA)，压力尤其严重，那里快速的城市化和经济增长，再加上气候变化和不可持续的水资源管理做法的挑战，造成了缓慢的燃烧和迅速出现的水资源压力。随着各国政府努力向家庭和企业提供安全、充足和可靠的水供应，这些行为者正在采取其他手段确保其供水，以确保其自身的复原力。个人机构在塑造集体复原力成果方面的作用是复原力研究中探索最少的领域之一，但经验表明，当政府采取行动的能力达到极限时，这一作用具有至关重要的意义。我的研究金解决了这一差距，并加强了对个人选择与城市地区及其更广泛社区的累积复原力之间相互作用的理解。它汇集了人类和比人类更多的关于复原力的概念，以更全面地了解形成复原力成果的结构和机构的范围，以及这对加强缺水城市的城市复原力治理的影响。初步研究确定了个别供水做法的性质，并揭示了支持这些做法的选择。这项研究强调了个人行动可能对个人和集体韧性结果产生的积极影响。它还确定了这些选择产生的复杂溢出效应，包括对水质的风险、过度抽取以及取水不平等的复合经济和社会影响。这项延长建议是在我担任研究员头四年所做研究的基础上提出的，目的是现在审议现有做法对未来治理安排的影响，并特别考虑共同治理办法。该提案的一个关键方面是进一步探讨个人行动如何通过适应(和不适应)行为来改变城市供水结构。这项研究结合了来自全球南方和全球北方的知识，以支持对复原力概念的更具包容性的理解。这项研究继续侧重于四个相互关联的案例研究背景：尼日利亚拉各斯、南非开普敦、纳米比亚温得和克和坦桑尼亚多多马。还保留了跨学科的方法--结合了水文地质学、行为科学和人文地理学的见解。

Building resilience to water crises is recognised as one of the primary challenges facing human society today. The pressures are particularly acute in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where rapid rates of urbanization and economic growth - combined with the challenge of climate change and unsustainable water management practices - create both slow burn and rapid onset water stress. As governments struggle to provide safe, adequate and reliable supplies of water to households and firms, these actors are implementing other means of securing their water supplies to ensure their own resilience. This role of individual agency in shaping collective resilience outcomes is one of the least explored areas of resilience research, yet experience demonstrates it is of vital significance when governmental capacity to act is stretched to its limits. My fellowship addresses this gap and strengthens understanding of the interplay between individual choices and the cumulative resilience of urban areas, and their wider communities. It draws together human and more-than-human concepts of resilience to provide a fuller understanding of the scope of structure and of agency in shaping resilience outcomes and the implications of this for strengthening the governance of urban water resilience in water stressed cities.Initial research has identified the nature of individual water practices and revealed the choices underpinning these practices. The research has highlighted the positive effects individual actions can have, both for personal and for collective resilience outcomes. It has also identified the complex spillover effects resulting from these choices, including risks to water quality, over-abstraction and compound economic and social effects of inequalities in water access. This renewal proposal builds on the research undertaken in the first four years of my fellowship to now consider the implications of existing practices for future governance arrangements, with a particular consideration of co-governance approaches. A key aspect of the proposal is to further explore how individual actions can act to transform the structures of urban water supplies through adaptive (and maladaptive) behaviours. The research combines knowledge from the global south and the global north to support the development of a more inclusive understanding of resilience concepts.The research continues to focus on four, linked, case-study contexts: Lagos, Nigeria; Cape Town, South Africa; Windhoek, Namibia, and Dodoma, Tanzania. The inter-disciplinary approach is also retained - combining insights from hydrogeology, behavioural science and human geography.