In the Swedish Act for higher education, as well as in the policies of technical universities, it is stated that sustainable development (SD) should be integrated into engineering education. Researchers argue that SD needs to be integrated into the overall course content rather than added as a specific course. In this paper, six engineering lecturers have been interviewed to give their views on how SD can be integrated into teaching water and sanitation engineers. Engineering lecturers seem unsure how to interpret SD in relation to their own specific courses. Students are said to request technical knowledge rather than fuzzy ideas of SD and lecturers struggle to open up the teaching to more problem-based perspectives. Sanitary professionals in work practice relate to SD as a core in water treatment processes and regret that responsibility for SD issues fall between traditional departmental structures in society.
It has been well known since the 1960s that developing countries need to improve their capacity to use science and technology and that more efforts must be put into R&D that would benefit poor countries and people. Serious efforts to accomplish this exist but they are still too few and small in relation to the size of the problem. Whilst the supply of knowledge and competent people slowly has been growing, there is still a continued lack of demand for domestic knowledge. Foreign consultants dominate knowledge supply to government, industry and aid donors. Small firms and farms are not used to articulate their demand for knowledge. Such weak demand and timid articulation are typical signs of emerging innovations systems. Despite this, there are signs of a fragmented domestic creative potential that could be mobilised to increase innovation for inclusive development. In this article, practical experiences in Uganda and Tanzania illuminate possibilities to articulate and address the knowledge demand from firms and farms through cluster formation. In this type of cluster formations, universities have key roles as knowledge providers and as intermediaries that assist in building the ties and linkages necessary to move the innovation system to a higher state.
The use of wastewater sludge on arable land in Sweden has been limited for some years due to the low quality, in some respects, of the sludge and to the reluctance of farmers and the food industry to use it. To improve the quality of the sludge, the ReVAQ project has been started, and it now involves seven municipal wastewater organisations. The goal of the project is to introduce a process in which the quality is successively improved by a series of actions taken by society. These actions include tracking and eliminating sources of heavy metals and other substances. As there are numerous sources of some of the substances, the work concentrates on the major sources. Another important activity is to provide information to the users of the wastewater system. The project is being evaluated by Urban Water AB. The results from the first two years indicate that it may be possible to reach the primary technical goal: to obtain a sludge quality that corresponds to that of household wastewater. The more ambitious goal of reaching a quality corresponding to that of WC water (the sum of urine and faeces) does not seem realistic without far-reaching changes in society. The organisations involved, which take the work seriously and are goal-oriented, have achieved measurable results in a short time. The work is also accepted and supported by the board members. More effort is needed, however, to inform the users about the system, and to [motivate them to] change their behaviour regarding matters such as the purchase of everyday products and the use of the toilet facilities.
In Cochabamba, the vulnerability assessment process focused on La Maica community and the agriculture sector. Community stakeholders were involved in workshops while municipal and regional actors participated through interviews. In the Kota process, the municipality was in the geographical focal point and a multilevel stakeholder group focused upon slum inhabitants. The suggested interventions and actions in both cities were dominated by systems (infrastructure and ecosystems) while identified barriers and facilitating factors to implementation revealed a greater acknowledgement of governance issues. Focus on marginalized groups and sectors is facilitated by the direct representations of those issues. While multi-stakeholder processes can be important forums for social learning adaptation planning that benefit vulnerable sectors and groups, with limited inclusion and responsibility given to representatives of marginalized sectors and groups for implementation actions, it is likely that the interests and priorities of more powerful actors will dominate and not contribute to increasing the resilience of the most vulnerable.
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