Explaining societal change through bricolage: Transformations in regimes of water governance

Abstract

This paper is motivated by the pressing need to understand how water use and irrigated agriculture can be transformed in the interests of both social and environmental sustainability. How can such change come about? In particular, given the generally mixed results of simplified, state-initiated projects of social engineering, what is the potential for transformations in societal regimes of governance to be anchored in the everyday practices of farmers? In this paper, we address these enduring questions in novel ways. We argue that the concept of bricolage, commonly applied to analysing community management of resources, can be developed and deployed to explain broad societal processes of change. To illustrate this, we draw on case studies of irrigated agriculture in Saharan areas of Algeria and in the occupied Golan Heights in Syria. Our case analysis offers insights into how processes of institutional, technological and ideational bricolage entwine, how the state becomes implicated in them and how multiple instances of bricolage accumulate over time to produce meaningful systemic change. In concluding, however, we reflect on the greater propensity of contemporary bricolage to rebalance power relations than to open the way to more ecological farming practices.

Institutional pathways for transforming groundwater planning and management: Reflections from Pakistan and Sri Lanka

“…We heard what the stakeholders had identified as research needs, but layered that with our own experiences of how those research needs had been most effectively addressed using the co‐inquiry approach we had adopted in Pakistan. Allowing researchers involved in multiple research projects to identify common emerging themes across the case studies offers a significant opportunity to improve and articulate more effective research practice (e.g., Malmborg et al, 2022; Mayaux et al, 2022). Once we had these two summaries, we used the commonalities to guide deeper reflection on the published report from Pakistan and data from Sri Lanka.…”

“…The concepts of co-inquiry and other transformative practices described above are gaining recognition, but actual practice on the ground is slow, not least because such sustainability transitions test embedded power relations. The challenges of this form of societal change can benefit from critical appreciation of their emergence as an intersecting bricolage of ideas, technologies, and institutional processes (Mayaux et al, 2022). The reflections on our efforts to establish an approach of co-inquiry for water resources management presented below offer insight into some of those emerging ideas.…”

Network embeddedness, entrepreneurial bricolage, and family farm sustainability

“…Clever farmers integrated fragmented, abandoned and seemingly useless technologies, techniques and knowledge selectively rather than waiting for the correct resources (Casey et al, 2022). By repairing, assembling or utilizing these resources, family farms not only increase the resource allocation efficiency, but also generate new heterogeneous values (Mayaux et al, 2022). However, existing studies mainly emphasized the importance of entrepreneurial bricolage, ignoring the process of family farm sustainability through entrepreneurial bircolage in different social networks.…”

“…Factors such as an individual's prior experience and social network, firms' development stage and social capital, and external resource constraints, had a significant impact on entrepreneurial bricolage (Baker and Nelson, 2005;Steffens et al, 2023). Entrepreneurial bricolage can be categorized into element bricolage, market bricolage and institutional bricolage (Baker and Nelson, 2005;Mayaux et al, 2022). Element bricolage was the act of transforming forgotten, seemingly useless and nonstandard material, skills or labor into production elements (Baker and Nelson, 2005).…”

“…The case study shows that Chinese countryside is a society characterized by a ordered pattern, so family farms are able to reconfigure the various resources embedded in the rural social network through entrepreneurial bricolage, thus effectively reducing resource costs, enhancing competitive advantage and realizing sustainable development. In other words, family farms embedded in multiple networks further integrate, reorganize or create heterogeneous resources (Makadok, 2001;Mayaux et al, 2022), and progressively adopt entrepreneurial bricolage strategies such as element production, skill learning, product innovation, brand building and industry chain extension to co-create and share knowledge experiences and outcomes with multiple stakeholders (Adro and Franco, 2020).…”