Discovering the Political Implications of Coproduction in Water Governance

Abstract

This paper asks what lessons can be learned from experiences with coproduction in water governance. For this, we review a comprehensive corpus of articles in the field of water governance that relies on the term. We find that there are radically different understandings of what coproduction means in different branches of the water governance literature. Through this review, we demonstrate how and why coproduction needs to be analyzed for its political implications. Despite being timely and pressing, these questions are not addressed in a sufficient way by the scholarly debate on coproduction. In order to fill this knowledge gap, we first distinguish different historical traditions of coproduction and then explore their political implications along three questions: The “why?”, the “who?”, and the “how?”. We show that these questions find different answers not just between but also within different traditions of using the term. After describing and contrasting these variants, we conclude by summarizing the main lessons from our review and by identifying questions which call for future research.

Promoting Environmental Justice through Integrated Mapping Approaches: The Map of Water Conflicts in Andalusia (Spain)

“…Since its early stages, a consistent aspiration of this kind of participatory mapping has been to engage and empower marginalized groups in society through the use of spatial technologies, which have become a useful tool for environmental justice movements to transmit and report environmental conflicts, and uneven socio-ecological damage [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. Founded in this theoretical context, the design, and elaboration of the webmap of water conflicts in Andalusia has been based on cooperative research and knowledge co-production through an integrative process of the "instrumental" and "empowerment" perspectives [23], while implementing an integrated participatory-collaborative mapping approach [3], as discussed in the following sections.…”

“…This highlighted the negotiation-reaction and knowledge co-production process referred to earlier. This is, perhaps, the most representative case of the need to reconcile technical-scientific and colloquial language, the techno-social utility of compiled information, and its socio-political utility and the project's "instrumental" and "empowering" perspectives [23].…”

Planning in Democratizing River Basins: The Case for a Co-Productive Model of Decision Making

“…In doing so, we sought to realize the essence of a co-productive model of decision-making in planning, within the limitations of each project (such as language barriers, constrained access to local level stakeholders, and budgetary constraints). In this model, multiple state and non-state actors build knowledge together via processes they value (e.g., processes they regard as credible, legitimate, relevant), leading in turn to outcomes they value (e.g., a strategy regarded as legitimate; citizenship regarded as empowered) [27]. By contrast, in a rational choice model of decision-making, a much narrower group of (elite) policy actors processes information provided by stakeholders and experts, and maximizes societal welfare on the basis of such inputs [24].…”

“…This model attaches relatively greater weight to the knowledge of non-credentialed experts. Through collaborative processes involving diverse actors, it seeks to produce agreement on shared goals, and to produce knowledge relevant to achieving those goals [27][28][29][30]. In the second model, authorities make decisions after recognizing, participating in, and responding to recommendations from co-productive processes (Section 3.2).…”

Knowledge Co-Production and Transdisciplinarity: Opening Pandora’s Box

“…We begin with the paper Discovering the Political Implications of Coproduction in Water Governance, in which Lepenies et al [18] present a critical analysis on knowledge co-production in water governance. Carrying on a comprehensive literature review on co-production in water governance, the authors identify the various meanings associated with co-production processes in different historical traditions, and investigate their political implications along the lines of three questions: How co-production is justified, how power and responsibility are allocated, and how effective and legitimate these processes are in exerting power.…”