Action Research’s Potential to Foster Institutional Change for Urban Water Management

Abstract

Abstract:The paper discusses the potential of action research to meet the challenges entailed in institutional design for urban water management. Our overall aim is to briefly present action research and discuss its methodological merits with regard to the challenges posed by the different conceptual bases for extrapolating the effects of institutional design on institutional change. Thus, our aim is to explore how Action Research meets the challenge of scoping the field in an open fashion for determining the appropriate mechanisms of institutional change and supporting the emerging of new water institutions. To accomplish this aim, we select the Water Framework Directive (WFD) as an illustrative driving force requiring changes in water management practices and implying the need for the emergence of new institutions. We employ a case of urban water management in the Volos Metropolitan Area, part of the Thessaly region in Greece, where a Pilot River Basin Plan was implemented. By applying action research and being involved in a long process of interaction between stakeholders, we examine the emergence of new institutions dealing with urban water management under the general principles of the major driving force for change: the WFD.

Introducing decentralized pasture governance in Kyrgyzstan: Designing implementation rules

“…Hence, it is difficult to identify one of the common grand theories of institutional change as a compelling explanation of rule design (for a summary of those theories see, Kingston and Caballero, 2009;Milczarek, 2002;Zikos and Thiel, 2013). Even theoretical specifications for the post-socialist context (Allio et al, 1997) which see institutional change a result of ''realizations of opportunities for Pareto improvements'' (economic theory), strategic government actions aiming to satisfy the electorate (public choice theory) and the benefits that materialized as ''the by-product of distributional conflict'', (distributional theory) (Allio et al, 1997, p. 320) do not comprehensively explain the observed processes.…”

Understanding Human Actions and Institutional Change: What Are the Impacts of Power Asymmetries on Efficiency in Pasture Use?

“…Intended institutional change, implies the deliberate replacement of existing, formal or informal institutions, or the creation of new institutions with the aim of changing de facto institutions by regularizing actors' interactions [1]. Changes in institutions following institutional design can emerge as an outcome of changed perceptions about roles, identities, normative values, cognitive frames and rules in a particular context.…”

“…Changes in institutions following institutional design can emerge as an outcome of changed perceptions about roles, identities, normative values, cognitive frames and rules in a particular context. It has been argued however that outcomes of institutional design can be essentially unpredictable, largely depending on the specificities of the problem situation and the way in which experience, expert knowledge or intuition are applied [1]. A variety of theories…”

Micro-level crafting of institutions within integrated catchment management: Early lessons of adaptive governance from a catchment-based approach case study in England

“…The stakeholders for the catchment are many and varied, as outlined in Table 4. The hosting and development of this pilot catchment is being reviewed using an action research approach (Zikos and Thiel, 2013) as this acts as a 'conduit for conveying change' through the bottomup participatory framework being used to deliver integrated catchment management. The data were gathered at various stages of the process from a participatory workshop of on-line questionnaires.…”

“…The benefit would be to increase understanding of the micro-level or 'crafting' of institutions and potentially be able to assess the effectiveness of such an approach where it takes place. One pilot catchment is examined in detail using an action research approach (Zikos and Thiel, 2013) where an integrated bottom-up participatory framework is being trialed.…”