Experimenting with practical transition groundwater management strategies for the urban poor in Sub Saharan Africa

在撒哈拉以南非洲（SSA）的非正式未规划城市地区，没有提供或扩大适当的公共供水服务。文献中的解释包括技术困难、薄弱的制度设置和贫乏的地籍信息。此外，城市贫民往往缺乏在城市舞台上行使权力以改变其处境的政治或经济资源；相反，它们受制于商业化、工业化和水获取的“全部成本回收”。在这种情况下，地下水被作为替代，主要是通过私人供应商，从自己或共用的井和/或非政府组织经营的售货亭自行供应。然而，无论是季节性还是在整个城市地区的不同地点，质量良好和安全的地下水都是稀缺的。此外，对城市地区的水文循环，包括地表水和地下水的流动模式和相互作用、相关的运输速度、污染物运输的动态以及城市地区补给和排放区域的存在，了解甚少。因此，目前尚不清楚天然地下水储量能否以及能维持这些日益增长的城市地下水需求多久。社会、体制、财政和环境条件使城市贫民对地下水的依赖成为一项挑战，可能导致城市贫民的生活质量、收入和预期寿命下降。因此，它可以被视为一个复杂和持久的社会问题，就未来的发展而言，这是高度不确定的，而且很难管理，因为它植根于不同的社会领域。此外，这些问题似乎无法用传统的方法和手段或通过现有的机构来解决。缺乏的是信息、整合、连贯性和系统思维。这个问题的解决方案同样复杂且不直接；它将涉及不同的利益相关者，它需要社会学习，达成解决方案是不确定的，将需要很长时间。T-GroUP由当地过渡小组主办，重点关注坎帕拉（乌干达）、阿鲁沙（坦桑尼亚）和阿克拉（加纳）的部分地区，作为撒哈拉以南非洲地区日益增长的混合城市地区的例子，包括依赖地下水的贫民窟贫困人口。T-GroUP将首先牢牢扎根于以需求为导向的前沿跨学科社会和自然研究。当前和历史上的多尺度地下水使用制度和多层次治理安排是什么？这些地区的权力结构和权力动态是如何存在的？金融和经济因素是如何发挥作用的？这些是我们向自己提出的更具社会性、治理性、制度性和社会经济性质的问题。从环境和自然科学的角度来看，我们的目标是利用我们最近开发的下一代DNA测序技术和qPCR技术来解开复杂的城市地下水流动系统和含水层病原体分布模式。然后，我们的项目将变成一个社会-生物物理过渡实验。上述这些地区将成为城市转型实验室，我们计划在其中实施转型管理周期（TMC），该周期能够妥善处理上述复杂的社会问题，并将不可持续的水资源利用转化为包容性的城市地下水管理，从而关注城市贫困人口的作用和需求。TMC的关键组成部分包括多方利益相关者平台（“学习联盟”）、战略规划和小规模示范，以展示向可持续地下水管理过渡的前景。TMC是为发展影响而设计的，也是研究的主题：与我们之前开发的TMC不同，我们的目标是达到一个适合我们研究区域复杂背景下地下水使用的TMC，这可以在撒哈拉以南非洲的其他城市复制。

Adequate public water services are not provided in, or expanded to, informal unplanned urban areas in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Explanations in the literature range from technical difficulties, weak institutional settings, and poor cadastral information. Also, urban poor tend to lack the political or economic resources to exercise power within the urban arena to change their situation; rather, they are subject to commercialisation, industrialisation and 'full cost recovery' for water access. In such cases, groundwater is turned to as an alternative, mainly through private vendors, self-supply from own or shared wells, and/or NGO-run kiosks. However, groundwater of good and safe quality is scarce, either seasonally or at different locations throughout the urban area. Also, there is very little insight in the hydrologic cycle within the urban area, including surface water and groundwater flow patterns and interactions, associated transport velocities, dynamics of pollutant transport, and the presence of recharge and discharge areas in the urban area. Therefore, it is unknown if and how long natural groundwater reserves can sustain these increasing urban groundwater demands.Social, institutional, financial and environmental conditions make the dependence of urban poor on groundwater a challenge that may lead to reduction of the quality of living, income, and life expectancy of the urban poor. It can therefore be regarded a complex and persistent societal problem, which is highly uncertain in terms of future developments and hard to manage, since it is rooted in different societal domains. Also, these problems seem impossible to solve with traditional approaches and instruments or through existing institutions. What is lacking is information, integration, coherence, and systemic thinking. The solution to the problem is likewise complex and not straight-forward; it will involve different stakeholders, it requires social learning, and arriving at the solution is uncertain and will take a long time.Hosted by Local Transitioning Teams, and focusing on parts of Kampala (Uganda), Arusha (Tanzania), and Accra (Ghana), as examples of growing mixed urban areas in Sub-Saharan Africa, including poor people in slums, who depend on groundwater, T-GroUP will first firmly root itself in cutting edge demand-led interdisciplinary social and natural research. What are current and historic multi-scale groundwater use-regimes and multi-level governance arrangements, how were and are power structures and power dynamics present in these areas, and what is how do financial and economic factors come into play? These are the more social, governance, institutional and socio-economic type of question we ask ourselves. From the environmental and natural sciences point of view, we aim to unravel complex urban groundwater flow systems and patterns in pathogen distributions in aquifers using next generation DNA sequencing techniques and qPCR techniques we recently developed. Then, our project will turn into a socio-biophysical transition experiment. These areas described above become Urban Transitioning Laboratories in which we plan to implement a Transition Management Cycle (TMC), which is able to properly deal with the complex societal problem described above, and which can convert unsustainable water use into inclusive urban groundwater management, thereby focusing on the role and the needs of the urban poor. Key components of the TMC include multi-stakeholder platforms ('Learning Alliances'), strategic planning, and small scale demonstrations to show the promise in making the transition towards sustainable groundwater management. Being designed for development impact, the TMC is also subject of research: departing from a TMC we developed earlier, we aim to arrive at a TMC tailored to groundwater use in the complex context of our study areas, which can be replicated in other cities in Sub-Saharan Africa.