Networks
Creating Collaborative Hubs Within, and Among, the United Nations
By Sarah Wolfe
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The organizations that implement technical water management strategies, for example conventional irrigation, water allocation and pricing strategies, are increasingly confronted with complex systems. These problems are characterized by high uncertainty and unexpected outcomes following policy intervention (Cillier 1998). To address these challenges, resource managers should practise adaptive management—a flexible, systematic process that acknowledges uncertainty and encourages learning from outcomes. But such an adaptive response may be incompatible with the organizations' existing policies, programmes and project responses. There is an inherent tension between complex water management challenges that require adaptive, flexible responses and inflexible organizations. One way to remedy this would be the removal or mitigation of barriers within United Nations organizations. The United Nations is operating in "increasingly complex environments, as well as under conditions of rapid change, fewer resources and greater uncertainty" (Mitchell 1997); the characteristics of complex systems complicate decision-making in water management. Complex systems contain a high number of scaled entities, are self-organizing, constantly evolving and unpredictable. As part of this system, hydrological crises may exhibit emergent phenomena, where the whole (outcome) is greater than the sum of its parts (strategies)—for example in Central Asia, where river water extraction in the Aral Sea region resulted in a radically new and largely unexpected hydrological system. Positive feedbacks also play a role in complex systems: in India, where agricultural groundwater pumping and declining water tables lead to even more pumping, the feedback loop intensifies existing scarcity (Burke and Moench 2000). In complex systems, small variations can have very large systemic outcomes at an unknown time. While the physical and social system can self-adjust (adapt) to a new equilibrium, the catalyst may be unknown and unexpected in existing environmental conditions. The complex system characteristics of water problems make effective responses and policy, programme and projects implemented by international organizations immensely difficult. The existing organizational structures, and their subsequent strategies, will be continuously challenged to respond to global freshwater problems. A frequent approach to freshwater issues has been "technical cooperation" at regional and national levels. In 1999, international organizations spent $14.3 billion on technical cooperation initiatives, an amount double what was spent in 1969 (Fukuda-Parr et al. 2002). Designed to transfer managerial or technical knowledge and skills, technical cooperation can be free-standing or associated with a project, has multiple iterations and can range from workshops, training manuals, field studies or data transfers. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) regional workshops on water demand management in 2000 and water allocation policies in 2001 in Central and Western Asia are two examples designed to transfer knowledge and facilitate change. But according to Fukuda-Par et al., technical cooperation's ability to resolve practical management crises, instigate long-term institutional transformations or build individual and national capacity remains unclear. Given the levels of financial and human investment involved, critiques of technical cooperation are not unexpected. Research suggests that technical cooperation activities may undermine local capacity, distort management and priorities, emphasize high profile activities, fixate on targets, use expensive methods and ignore local wishes. Beyond these critiques, technical cooperation can also be a rigid, non-adaptive response. This may be because of its mechanistic ("break the problem apart and fix components"), monistic ("one best way to do things"), and objective ("separate ourselves from the problem") characteristics. Extrapolating from these characteristics, technical cooperation problems persist because the guiding development model was based on two mistaken assumptions: first, that "it is possible to ignore existing capacities in developing countries and replace them with knowledge and systems produced elsewhere"—for example, that the engineering approach and economic rationale used for irrigated agriculture in the southwestern United States would be most applicable in Central Asia. The second assumption is that the existence of an "asymmetric donor-recipient relationship", where power dynamics define inequitable potential partnerships, does not influence the technical cooperation process and outcomes (Fukuda-Parr et al. 2002). These assumptions influence the freshwater issues that are successfully addressed by technical cooperation. But there may be another, less understood or acknowledged, obstacle: the informal and formal barriers within the development organizations that implement technical cooperation. For organizations to solve complex systems problems, technical cooperation must adopt adaptive management strategies where scale permits. To do so, any existing organizational barriers must be removed or blunted. Obstacles to sustainable freshwater management have been traditionally engineering issues, e.g., inadequate pumping technology or water distribution infrastructure. More recently, the local, regional or national levels of individual or institutional capacity and innovation have been recognized. But at the international level, organizations also contain potential barriers to the flexibility and continuous learning necessary for solving complex problems. Exogenous and endogenous structural barriers influence organizational responses. Exogenous barriers include institutional factors like international legal or economic systems. Focussing on internal barriers, Gunderson et al. have argued that endogenous barriers can impede innovation and adaptation where "human systems have much greater powers for both rigidity and novelty. The ability of the bureaucracy of a government agency to control information and resist change seems to show a level of individual and group ingenuity and persistence that reflects conscious control by dedicated and intelligent individuals". Although undoubtedly written with a sense of humour, the quote retains an element of truth. Formal endogenous barriers form an organizational structure that affects the likelihood of change. One example would be the momentum of the project pipelines: how quickly and through what channels programmes are required to move through the organization's structure. Another formal endogenous barrier would be a restructuring to encourage interdisciplinary or sustainable research; without adequate management preparation, new responsibilities may be perceived as a threat to output quality or the status quo. Another such barrier is the information available to project officers. In freshwater management, for example, the geophysical data on resource problems are abundant (if not always readily accessible), but "understanding of the social, economic, institutional and political dimensions essential for effective management lags far behind" (Burke and Moench 2000). The information availability and project pipeline barriers can make the transition from technical to adaptive responses more difficult. For example, water policy workshops may rely on a template based on economic priorities of full cost recovery, efficiency and rural-urban allocation decisions not necessarily appropriate for the diverse local or regional context. However, because of information and temporal constraints within the donor organization, as well as informal endogenous barriers discussed below, the technical cooperation template is not revised to meet the unique needs of recipient countries.Depending on the social and environmental context of the recipients, the responses (straightforward when training professionals on how to build, operate and maintain infrastructure) are less effective when trying to transfer concepts of local participation, empowerment, sustainability, environmental values and perceptions. Informal endogenous barriers also shape the individual decisions and organizational outcomes. These implicit barriers are less likely to be assessed for their influence on technical cooperation for water management. Decision makers must address environmental uncertainties and vastly increasing, often conflicting, information. The human response to uncertainty has been to establish and maintain regularities—in behaviour, operating procedures and larger systems—often to develop systemic efficiency. But organizational efficiency is at the expense of individual flexibility and quickly hardens into rigidity, which becomes a barrier for individuals operating within the organization: the implicit signals of success—e.g., consistently "successful" project outcomes are conducive to promotion or contract renewal—become those that maintain the endogenous regularities. Challenging established organizational regularities or barriers means substantial risks and responsibilities to the individual officer or project manager. These often implicit risks, in turn, define the organization's culture (Kaufman 1971). The subtle disincentives that exist within an organization's unique culture may be a powerful barrier to adaptive management responses. For example, our conventional perceptions of knowledge suggest that the greater the supply of information, the more likely learning, decisions and adaptation will occur. To support individual learning and decision-making, organizations dedicate significant resources to the collection of data for freshwater management. But the assumption of improved decision-making can be erroneous because learning, which mostly upsets beliefs and habits in individuals and organizations, is hardly likely to be embraced easily or enthusiastically, even though there is a growing and sometimes powerful recognition of the need for change (Michael 1995). Challenges to implementing adaptive management responses in international organizations will continue because "the constraints of professional training and competence, the limits of organizational authority and the ignorance of the outcomes of many actions, past and future, impede the balanced formulation of all potential solutions and options". Without mitigation techniques to facilitate individual and organizational learning, innovation "threats" may prevent the adoption of new information or benefits of adaptation (Michael 1995; Martin et al. 2001). Finally, the resource management and development literature has not sufficiently explored the influence of an organization's culture within the United Nations and on resource responses. If decision makers are predisposed to operate according to the regularities of formal and informal structure, research must document the barriers for individual decision makers, their choice of responses and the water management outcomes of those choices. UN organizations, particularly those directly responsible for issues related to integrated water management, are critical for freshwater management. They can be collaborative hubs with the capacity to transfer relevant knowledge and support necessary institutional reforms. For them, one objective must be to construct flexible, innovative and resilient structures. These structures will allow for adaptive strategies, which are designed to permit ongoing learning from uncertainty, unexpected events and failure, to be applied to policies, programmes and projects. Building resilient and flexible organizations within the UN system will initially be difficult, but first steps might include: These steps are complementary to the unique qualities of the UN organizations. They would help build the necessary adaptive responses for freshwater management and poverty alleviation. |
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Burke, Jacob J. and Marcus Moench. Groundwater and Society: Resources, Tensions and Opportunities. Themes in Groundwater Management for the Twenty-first Century. New York: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs and the Institute for Social and Environmental Transition, 2000. Cilliers, Paul. Complexity and Post Modernism: Understanding Complex Systems. London: Routledge, 1998. Fukuda-Parr, Sakiko, Carlos Lopes and Khalid Malik, Eds. "Overview: Institutional Innovations for Capacity Development." Capacity for Development: New Solutions to Old Problems. London: Earth Scan Publications and United Nations Development Programme, 2002. Gleick, Peter. The Changing Water Paradigm: A Look at Twenty-first-Century Water Resources Development. Water International 25, 1 (2000): 127-138. Gunderson, Lance H. and C. S. Holling. Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. London: Island Press, 2002. Kaufman, Herbert. The Limits of Organizational Change. University of Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 1971. Martin, R. L., Mary Ann Archer and Loretta Brill. Why Do People and Organizations Produce the Opposite of What They Intend? Special Report to the Walkerton Inquiry, Part II, 2001. Michael, Donald N. "Barriers and Bridges to Learning in a Turbulent Human Ecology." Gunderson, Lance H., C. S. Holling and Stephen S. Light, Eds. Barriers and Bridges to the Renewal of Ecosystems and Institutions. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. 461-85. Mitchell, Bruce. Resource and Environmental Management. Essex: Addison Wesley Longman, 1997. |
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