 Okay, so good evening, afternoon, good morning from where you are. Nice to see you all again in this webinar, in the webinar series in our TransPath Planning Project. And today we have Charlene Gomez of IHC Delft, who is going to share her knowledge and experience with us on transdisciplinary approaches to problem-diagnosed, very urban water issues. And the insights from her research in Southeast Asia, all said more than enough, I think. So I see Charlene, you are also ready. Yes. So please. Thank you, yeah. And I'm looking forward to your story. Okay, hello everyone. Yeah, so as the app suggested today, I just want to walk you through two projects that I have been involved in in very urban South Asia, and they were both transdisciplinary projects. And I want to focus more on the problem diagnosis stages of these projects in terms of how they were set up and some of the challenges and strengths in the way that we approach this, because I know that all of the other TransPath project nodes are at similar stages. So I thought it's a nice time to share insights or lessons learned from these ones. Okay, so just to set the stage, I am talking today about projects in very urban South Asia. And so to give you a little bit of insight as to what very urban areas are, some of you might already be very familiar with them, but they are very close to expanding cities. And these are very dynamic areas. They are always changing in population, economic activities, land use changes. And as a result, this transformation process is ongoing. They are also very heterogeneous in terms of their social composition, which means that, sorry, water needs are constantly evolving as well during the transformation process. And one unique thing that is very relevant for the two projects I'm going to discuss is that these communities are largely isolated from decision-making arenas. So that makes, has some impact as to the voice that they have in navigating these transformations and dealing with water-related challenges as they come up. So the very urban transformation has also shown to cause a variety of issues on local water resources, which includes access issues to water infrastructure, also competition over water resources from industries, from cities, but also competition between different kinds of water users within the community, contamination, both of surface and groundwater. And in parts of South Asia that I will discuss today, there's a lot of arsenic, iron, salinity issues. There's also over-exploitation. And as a result of all of these pressures, conflicts have also arisen between different water users over time. So with that in mind, I'll take you through the first project that I did actually as part of my PhD when I was at TU Delft. So this was called the Shifting Grounds Project, which was looking at institutional transformation, enhancing knowledge and capacity to manage groundwater issues in the very urban Ganges Delta. So as part of this project, the main objective was to build knowledge and capacity among local actors to support a transformation process within these very urban Delta communities in both Bangladesh and India. And in terms of the transformation here, what we were trying to achieve was a pro-poor, sustainable and equitable management of groundwater resources. So this project took place as the name suggests in the Ganges Delta. We had two cities situated with the Delta, which was Kolkata in India and Kulna in Bangladesh. And around each city, we had selected two very urban communities to do our research and capacity-building activities in. What was a unique aspect about these four project sites or case studies was that they were located in the same Ganges Delta system. So similar hydrogeology and also similar culture based on their location in South Asia, but situated in different countries. And therefore the institutional systems and governance systems were unique. So that makes it interesting to study from a governance perspective, which is what I do. And so how were these project sites selected? So this was done actually during the phase of the proposal development. The team members had conducted some prescoping visits to the region and came up with a selection of these four communities based on various criteria that is listed on the slide. So they had to be very urban in nature. They had to be dependent on groundwater. There should be some evidence of contestation or conflict over the access to groundwater resources, but also promising research conditions and willingness to engage in the research over the next four years of the project. So to go over now the project's design. So this was a transdisciplinary project, as I mentioned. So on the research side, we had integrated research from three different perspectives. One is the institutional system that I focused on using different methods like institutional analysis, also game theory, modeling, and serious games. So that was the part that I worked on as a PhD. Then there was also a postdoc that looked at the socio-economic system using the multi-dimensional poverty assessment tool and a groundwater modeler from Bangladesh University of Engineering Technology who studied the biophysical system. Alongside in parallel was capacity building efforts that were led by our NGO partners on the ground in both of these countries, which were structured using what is known as the negotiated approach. This approach is focused on bottom-up capacity development involving communities in decision-making and negotiations over local issues, but also supporting knowledge development about the problems and community empowerment. And so the idea is that these two sort of efforts would be happening in parallel, but that there would be a lot of synergies and cross-fertilization between them. So we would provide a lot of inputs from our scientific research into the ongoing capacity building efforts and likewise it would serve as a source of data for our own research activities. So in that, that was the way the transdisciplinary approach was structured in the project. So how did this look over time? So I have a timeline that gives you an idea of all the different activities that were undertaken and this is from my own research perspective. So it's focused only on the institutional research that I conducted, not for the entire project and the other researchers. But we started in October 2014 and we had a series of different stakeholder engagement activities including larger workshops with local communities as well as with some local government representatives over time. But in addition to that, we also conducted more regular, less formal, mango tree meetings in the village with representatives from the different villages and both of these activities were led by our local NGO partner, one based in Kolkata, one based in Kulna. Then of course, I conducted my own field research which was very participatory in nature and so a lot of interviews and focus group discussions with communities as well as with government stakeholders which provided some project reports that could be used not just by myself but also by the other researchers and then finally we had these moments during the entire project where there would be research uptake. So these were the ways that the scientific research also fed into the capacity building efforts on the ground. So either in discussions about the institutional context of the problems that the community were examining, discuss what kind of strategies and actors are involved in those problems and finally exploration of solution strategies to address these problems. So looking back on the project design and the way the research and capacity building efforts took place, I thought of some sort of key lessons and the first one I want to share is that the problem diagnosis stage was actually a very iterative process. Like I mean I showed this timeline over here but if you see that step one which is problem identification and essentially problem diagnosis, it almost runs the entire sort of duration of the project. So problem diagnosis was really an iterative process and to give you an example, so at the first stage of our community engagement, the community identified three key problems that was affecting them and this was the community in Periyub and Kulna. So the first was access to safe drinking water. The second was canal encroachment and water logging and the third was waste dumping by the city corporation. But then over time when we started to discuss who are the actors and what are the institutions behind these problems, we got a further revision of the safe drinking water problem. The first being that there was an allocation issue as to how drinking water infrastructure was being distributed in these Periyuban areas and the second is that not only were public providers involved but there are also alternate water service providers that were quite active. So that was a sort of further refinement and then when I conducted some field interviews at a later stage that led to another revision of the problem. So here we found that there were actually two main scenarios to consider. One was the existing Periyuban drinking water scenario, what is happening as of now but there was also a very important future urban drinking water scenario that was emerging because of their proximity to the city. So that was the first thing to consider. The second was that was similarly the infrastructure allocation problem but this was quite different from the water quality problem and that was largely relating to the groundwater, the way groundwater was monitored in the region. So in this way we could sort of further break up the problem into a current versus future problem but also in terms of water access versus water quality and so even though this problem diagnosis can be iterative and take a lot of time it is helpful because it identifies not just societal priorities but also in our project help us identify capacity building needs. So we could say we could sort of reflect on the fact that okay the community has this problem but what they're actually lacking is an understanding of what institutions are playing an important role in the problem or how to negotiate the solutions that they are considering. So then I could also adapt my research accordingly to provide those kinds of inputs into the capacity building process. The second lesson that I want to highlight here is that the transdisciplinary projects based on my experience here was that it does require a lot of flexibility among the project team. Not all societal concerns can be addressed by the project team in the same way because our funding commitments or what our funders require us to focus on but also data availability, political sensitivity and project resources. So for example like I mentioned there were three issues that were identified but our proposal that we got funding for was focus on groundwater issues. So that limited the option for us to take up the other two issues which were the most surface water resource related in the similar capacity. So how did we compensate for that? So with one the canal related issues our local NGO partner helped the villagers develop a small scale management plan and for the waste dumping issues during one of my field visits I investigated that in a very sort of limited way and prepared a short brief that we shared and presented to the community about how waste is managed by the Kulnasadi Corporation. And here I should say that in the end like what we really ended up focusing on was that drinking water issue in the village because that was the one that was groundwater focused entirely. Okay then the other aspect was that so I mentioned we have activities going on in two different countries right in Kolkata as well. In Kolkata so while the capacity building activities continued pretty well in Kulna region in Kolkata they had to adapt a negotiation negotiated approach because of political and problem sensitivity in one of the villages of Thihoria and this was because we as a team had actually limited understanding of the social political dynamics that were going on in the village. So for example there was a very strong pro and anti-bottle water plant lobby which made it quite difficult to do research but also political changes during the project also influenced our ability to engage with this community and at certain points even pose serious risk for the participants. So even though this community also faced a safe drinking water problem instead of exploring it in a similar way as we did in Kulna we sort of pivoted and decided to do an arsenic testing and mapping campaign because arsenic was a big problem with drinking water in this region and it was an issue that sort of was less sensitive than exploring say the bottled water dynamics of the drinking water problem. The other issue was the resource constraints so we had 4 case studies but early on we sort of discovered that the amount of time and resources that are needed to do this entire research and capacity building in all four cases is really intensive so we focused our efforts on two case studies instead of four and so the transdisciplinary research was still done in all four case studies but less so in two of them in a less intensive way and the and similarly two of the case studies did not have the same intensive capacity building efforts on the ground and the other important lesson in terms of flexibility was really the need or the amount of time that was required to build relationships for conducting the project in Kolkata it took a lot more time and it was really important that we cultivated those relationships over there because of how hierarchical it was compared to Bangladesh our NGO partner over there also had limited connections especially at the higher decision making level and so when I would do my field visits initially I would spend a lot of time then going and meeting people telling them about the project getting them on board and sort of willing to engage with us which takes away from also some research time as well but it was really important because otherwise I I think it would have been even more difficult to do research in that context and similarly as I mentioned we had a person who was modeling the the Delta system and for him it was very difficult to get access to groundwater data from India to build his cross boundary hydrological model because of data access problems and perhaps some underlying diplomacy issues perhaps but yeah so those were the kinds of constraints that resulted from the the kind of relationships and networks that we had in in both of those contexts the third lesson which I think was extremely valuable in that project was thinking outside the box when it came to societal engagement so we really experimented with or innovative for us innovative methods various kinds of community engagement platforms and really building on the strength of existing networks to conduct our activities so with regards to methods we use a lot of visual and interactive methods to discuss otherwise very complex problems or very abstract concepts so for example social map were used in both of our villages and that really helped them during the discussions about these problems and likewise in my own research part of my role was to give them strategic a space to explore strategic solutions and I did this using role playing games as a medium for discussing otherwise what have would have been very abstract concepts like strategies and values so that was quite a nice sort of takeaway from the project for us as researchers but also for the people who were conducting the capacity building efforts on the ground and then also terminology is really important right if you're doing transdisciplinary research people from different disciplines might have very different understandings of the same kind of things and so we created a glossary of key terms that was not only used by us as researchers but also used by the local facilitators when discussing these same concepts with the community so key terms especially technical terms relating to the groundwater system or institutional terminology it really helped build community awareness on what would otherwise be quite a sort of black box vague and abstract topic and in this way empowered residents in the context where it was used and the community oh and then the last point was the community organization the way we sort of approached that really helped with the our ability to engage with them over four years throughout the project so in the Kulna case we set up a six-member community negotiation group which would then lead the advocacy efforts on behalf of their village with local authorities this was quite balanced in gender but what we discovered that the male voices still tended to dominate in these discussions so that was a takeaway from that approach whereas in Kolkata we tried something similar but it wasn't led by us it was led by the local village leader they wanted to set up a village water and sanitation committee which is something that a platform that is government supported in in India or in West Bengal but that actually failed in reality because there was limited support from the local village leader so in that way we sort of didn't rely on that platform but just organized our discussions with the community in a different way so for example when we were doing the arsenic campaign in one of the villages in the Kolkata region then we made use of a very active local NGO called the Ramakrishna mission who was already doing some kind of ground water testing in that region and they had not only expertise but also water testing facilities that we could utilize in the project and likewise we engage an arsenic expert from a local medical college to then build awareness on our scenicosis and what that looks like in terms of a public health perspective so that was the first project that I that I was a part of and hopefully that's given you some insight into how the project was set up and what we experienced during the project the second one was actually a project that I was involved in during my postdoc which is maybe has some similarities to what the Transpath project is trying to do so it was about water transformations to sustainability in urban fringe areas and the objective was to understand the transformation process that were happening in these very urban areas across India with regards to access to water for both livelihoods and domestic purposes and at the same time identified transformation pathways to promote more sustainable development of these areas so this project took place in three metropolitan regions of India Pune city Hyderabad city and Kolkata city and in each city we picked two very urban sort of villages as well and so in total we had six case studies for doing the research but likewise for the transformation transformative pathways part of the project we selected one to really focus on the pathways building approaches so those are the ones that are highlighted in the map one year Kolkata one year Pune and one year Hyderabad so this project was also a bit similar in terms of design first we had integrated research that sort of covered three elements the institutions and governance aspects which was sort of the one that I focused on access to water for domestic issues which is what our partner at Saki Waters in Hyderabad focused on and one on water based livelihoods which are partner from Germany focused on in terms of research and the idea was that we would look at the vulnerabilities the transformation processes as well as adaptation that was currently happening in these different very urban sites but feed these into the adaptation pathways approaches that we would then do with local communities and local actors in the second half of the project so if we were going to support very urban transformations to adaptation pathways we sort of looked to the pathways literature and identified some sort of common steps that can be found across most pathways building approaches so obviously first you sort of start with the baseline situation what's currently happening then look into the future what is the vision the goals and objectives and aspirations and here I should mention actually that we were our goal was to build more normative pathways in these contexts so once you have that vision then you create your scenarios and you can compare them and analyze them and then develop your pathway from the current to the future scenarios and then you know fill in those details about the strategies the tipping points the signals etc and then finally reflect on your developed pathway schematic and what it means in terms of development or adaptation strategies in the future so using that sort of basic framework we had a plan for how we would then build these pathways with stakeholders in these three contexts so initially we wanted to do more bottom up pathways building and by that we would have a first workshop at the local level to identify contextual needs and largely engaging local livelihood groups spatial cluster groups local panchayat or local village leaders for example then follow that up with a state level workshop where they would actually build the pathways using those inputs from the local workshop and for this one we would engage different kind of stakeholders like government academic civil society as well as representatives from the first workshop and then finally a national level workshop which was more policy oriented and again feeding or utilizing the inputs from the pathways at the state level or at the previous workshop and this approach that we initially thought about we expected it to have three kinds of outputs the first was community ownership over the future pathways because it was community led and community based on community needs the second one was that there would be a potential for adaptation pathways to support rural to urban transformations because we were feeding it into the policy level at the national arena and this also gave us an opportunity to introduce an alternative planning approach to government stakeholders and how to deal and manage with these very urban areas so this was our original plan in the project for how we would do that pathways building process but our project happened to be during the global pandemic so by 2020 which was around the time where we wanted to initiate our pathways building efforts the COVID-19 crisis hit so there was extremely high infection rates in India as you know there was no travel possible no in-person workshops were possible and we didn't really know whether we could delay it and see what happens but then maybe people are not interested in talking to us because they have other priorities naturally and dealing with you know their own crises that were unfolding in that in that country so we had to really think about how what to do now basically do we just not do that part of the project or do we find another way and adapt the project design in order to still build pathways in a transdisciplinary way so we came up with like a remote stakeholder engagement process so we said okay we cannot visit these villages and virtual workshops were not suitable because of poor internet connection but also how would we arrange like computers and internet access for people to connect from their villages but we did know that there's excellent mobile coverage in India including in these more remote areas so what we did was we created a panel of 20 representatives from each of the three villages and this panel had representatives from the community representing both livelihood and water use like domestic water users as well as local government and instead of doing virtual workshops we would have telephone meetings with panel members one-on-one so before each meeting we would share some kind of preparatory materials so this included videos about what we were going to discuss as well as a questionnaire telling them the kinds of questions we were going to ask them and we share these over WhatsApp before each discussion around and in this way we conducted virtual iterative pathways building in over the course of three rounds and because we had to do this in the local languages which were different languages in all three contexts we hired and trained local facilitators to actually implement this on the ground so what this new adapted pathways building approach reflects is one that is supported by this Delphi method so a Delphi method is basically a forecasting method that also allows for group consensus building and the Delphi method uses questionnaires for one-on-one discussion over several rounds and in each round individual responses are collected from a panel and in subsequent rounds you share the group responses so people can reflect on what the group has said in the earlier round and then discuss further information or collect additional information and so on so what we did was we took those initial six five or six steps of the pathways and we sort of reconfigured it around this Delphi method such that we could iteratively build our pathways using this Delphi method in three different rounds with our stakeholders so I won't go into the details of this but there is a paper that really explains the methodology if you're interested and so based on this sort of revised transdisciplinary approach our project timeline looked a lot more like this so of course at the start of our project we started with our site selection you know what peri urban villages are we going to do these activities in and then our problem diagnosis was based on field visits by all of the researchers a survey that a household survey that was also conducted in each village as well as and sort of using those data inputs we then prepared for our transformative pathways processes so here these are just the steps that we did with our Delphi panel of local actors and at the same time we also conducted a similar exercise but very separately with experts so people from local universities or people from government agencies just to see if they have a very different idea about transformative pathways from the three villages but the two pathways building exercises were really separate and today I really want to focus on the pathways that we did with local actors only and then finally once the entire project was over we had a policy level workshop where we then presented results from our pathways building process and discussed it with more national level and state level representatives so what worked in this in this project and like let's look reflect a little bit on that so in our problem diagnosis we really approach it as best as possible from a transdisciplinary approach so us three researchers always visited the project sites together we conducted all of our field research together and that was really beneficial because it helped us identify early research synergies and integration opportunities but at the same time it allowed us to engage with a much broader group of societal actors and be more efficient with our time and at the same time reduce stakeholder fatigue because then they weren't being interviewed by three different people about three different topics we could do this in a very organized systematic way but these regular visits to the community also contributed to this relationship building which then proved very beneficial when it was time to then contact them to see if they wanted to be part of this pathways building effort later on then we also experimented with a variety of methods during the problem diagnosis phase which helped us with triangulation but also was a nice way to to discuss issues with the community so we had of course the more normal sort of interviews focus group discussion surveys but we did transact walks village cluster mapping timeline mapping problem sketching and guided tours so the map at the bottom left is basically an example of a cluster map that we developed and we could really get a sense of what the village looked like on the ground in these different clusters and made very short descriptions so this gave us a very rich understanding about these communities and in terms of how the villages were set up in with regards to governance with regards to livelihood functions domestic water use transformations etc so I think that really helped us when it came time to do our pathways building process because we had a good enough awareness of what the context we were dealing with look like and luckily as I mentioned those sort of initial field visits prove really valuable later on because they provided so much useful information as the basis for then building the pathways so the problem diagnosis phase was extremely helpful because they provided inputs on the baseline situation against which we could then design or co-design normative pathways with stakeholders so it not only gave us a geographic overview of the village but also the transformations that were already ongoing in terms of population in terms of infrastructure as well as changes in household water supply changes in livelihoods and what new opportunities were emerging in the village as well as threats to the current primary livelihoods and household water needs so there is a video that you can scan and have a look at which is a video explaining the baseline situation that we use in our first Delphi round so we shared this video with the local with the panel of people from the communities participated in our pathways building effort and of course it's in the local language but to give you a sense of how we then gave them a basis to then think about okay now this is my baseline what does the future look like and the other thing that was useful about the problem diagnosis was that it helped us identify priorities for the pathways building process so one was that we learned that the livelihood sector and the domestic water sector were extremely different and so we needed to actually tackle these two sectors very separately during our pathways building process so we designed co-designed separate pathways for both sectors with the actors it also gave us a sense of what representation is needed in creating this panel of local actors and at the same time the field visits gave us an early indication of maybe some suitable candidates to reach out to later on and then we also knew that there were three kinds of pathways that we had to that were important to consider one is obviously the business as usual pathway which is what people tended to think about at the moment in the village they also had a decent enough understanding of maybe what their preferred future is like and what their alternative future and so likewise we also designed pathways around those two kinds of futures and so overall I would summarize that the benefits from this project and the way that we designed this project was that it allowed us to continue engaging remote communities in these transformative pathways processes the Delphi brought structure to the discussion of pathways elements the way that we organized it because it had one-on-one question is I think it overcomes some of the group dynamics that you observe when you do say a workshop and certain voices tend to dominate others whereas that is removed if you have one-on-one discussions although the Delphi still allows for sharing of group responses in the next round so that's another benefit and so as a result these one-on-one discussions gives a much richer picture about the pathways elements that you would get in a workshop setting in my opinion then because it was very iterative it also encouraged meaningful reflection of the inputs by the other panel members so in this way the other actors and comparing it with the the person's own perceptions and preferences and so likewise like the Delphi it helped a little bit with consensus building and navigating conflict areas but it also highlighted areas where consensus was impossible and certain groups fundamentally deviated in terms of what their values were of or what the baseline situation was so those works sort of some methodological as well as transdisciplinary insights that we gained from doing this exercise but we also face obviously a lot of challenges in the process one it proved to be very intensive the whole process took 11 months from start to finish but that includes the time it takes to develop the methodology train the facilitators and then actually conduct the three different rounds and because it takes so long then it's difficult to keep participants engaged or still interested over that period of time some participants naturally missed face-to-face interaction I mean as did we but really in this case we were just forced by the pandemic to to sort of go this route and at the same time the the methodology also has a tendency to introduce certain biases like any other kind of research pathways building method I guess so one is that the longer duration of the entire exercise had the benefit of disconnecting people from topical events that were going on in their communities but at the same time we there was a risk that we introduced bias in the selection of our participants or by the investigators who were conducting the telephone discussions and synthesizing the data based on how they discussed the pathways elements with those actors so another challenge was the difficulty in explaining pathways concepts over telephone as you can imagine so one of the strategies that we adopted to make it accessible was to of course share those videos but likewise here also we provided a glossary of terms as to what we mean by each of those elements nevertheless it was still very difficult to discuss things like signals for example over the telephone and likewise and at the end of the day now we have these really nice pathways that represent transformative strategies and priorities at a village level but how do we scale that up into an actual adaptive plan this was obviously it targeted these villages but even if we compare the villages it does offer some policy inputs but which we shared in our final workshop with our policy sort of stakeholders but still there are projects sort of ended at the point of developing the pathways and then we didn't really have the opportunity to explore what comes after that how do we either bring those insights to the decision makers or how do we act upon those insights then so yeah if you want to know more there are a bunch of papers that were written about both of these projects that talk about the method as well as the transdisciplinary experiences that you can have a look at but otherwise thank you very much for your attention thank you very much charlene very interesting so i also looking at what i see already a hand raised by leon so leon please take your opportunity to ask i was just i was just a plug in but i can also ask a question but but maybe let's let's see if some colleagues have some things to ask because i have talked about this with charlene before yes so maybe somebody else would like yes please nizun kitaka thank you so much i'm sorry i i joined alia and then i realized that you know the youth what do you call the gmt the uta was a bit confusing so when i logged out i started doing other things and i realized i had done much really forgotten to join but anyway and thank you so much especially um on the last project which you you are working on the transformative pathways which is similar to what we are supposed to be doing but uh your approach was more on one on one so i have just a few questions number one how many people did you reach in this one on one one on one i mean on one on one discussion and secondly at the different levels were the same people whom you are who are in the first level how many of them went to the higher levels up to the policy making yeah so that every voice can be heard um and i glad i was going to ask you wasn't this intensive because this sounds very intensive and then my last one is uh what do you recommend in terms of follow-up you know once you identify these you identify the activities you identify the communist communities commit on what they are going to do that's a challenge i'm actually been scratching my head how do we follow up whether this is actually being implemented or is it only implemented when you agree and after that everybody goes and starts doing their own things yeah i would like to borrow and leave from you on what strategy have you put in place to try and monitor and see whether whatever you have agreed because more or less although you are doing it on one on one that is practically more or less the same systems we used on our t-labs where you identified you got into this level you committed and uh we even reached because even if you had the same people in a workshop we could take different groups in different academicians the policy makers on a separate room they'll come up with their own policies so by the end of the day we're the same thing but the question is how do we know whether what we agreed people are doing because the project doesn't have the capability in terms of fun finance to be able to follow that patch now thank you for your question so to answer the first one is that in each so we did this in three different locations and in each location we engaged with between 15 to 20 people so our target number for each panel was a minimum of 15 uh and a max of sort of our maximum of 20 just to keep it manageable as well for the researchers or the facilitators the second question you asked about how the representation at the higher levels so our initial plan was to start from the bottom and then go gradually to the higher levels but because of the pandemic then we couldn't do that so because the we felt that the decision makers would simply just not it wasn't the right time to engage them because they were so busy dealing with the pandemic so that's why we focused only on the pathways development from a completely local perspective so that's why that we have normative pathways that really emphasize what this each community wants and yeah it didn't really it was not followed up with the higher level but then that relates to your third question about what now right so what we did was we have these really nice pathways sketched out for three different villages that tell you what people want in the next 15 years for their communities but it's a plan it's a it's just sort of a nice schematic of what people want and possibilities for how to get there there were some local government stakeholders that were part of these panels but we did not have any discussions about how to now implement the pathways at the end of the the pathways building process so that for us is where the project ended like we developed the pathways and we discussed them with the stakeholders but the next phase of like okay now should we go to the higher level decision makers and say hey look you manage these peri urban communities this is what they want this is how you can make them more sustainable in terms of development how can you use these inputs to also adapt your own planning approaches that part was not really conducted in our project and so I'm also curious as to what would be the steps to have that next discussion like what do you need to discuss how to discuss it and then how to translate it into some kind of action probably there will be some negotiation that is needed between the local and the higher levels stakeholders but that was really something that the project didn't engage with beyond developing the pathways with the communities unfortunately okay yeah that helps me because that's really been something stretching and if you really want to do this from so much if we need to see how to get to the next level just in terms of monitoring maybe I don't know whether you are aware of the water what are they normally called water engineering and development center which is where deck which is which is a center dealing with sanitation for sustainable development and emergence relief it is actually under Lafbright University in UK I've been involved with them several times and they normally organize conferences which are purely basically looking at actions taken within those communities and I've seen a lot of examples from India because I've actually organized two and this year they have one so I could share with you the information because basically that's it is uptake it's more on the up top and the solution and how this is based yes please yes what are they called sorry water development it's WEDC okay I'll write on the chart okay okay yeah thank you yeah likewise I mean there's two ways to do it you could either like upscale it by connecting the local with the higher level or broadening the scope right so now you've done it for this one village but this one village is such a small community in this larger area so for example one of the villages we worked in was situated in a delta not a delta sorry a wetland but so this is only their ideas about how to manage the wetland if you really wanted to maybe have one of the wetland management authority for example one of the questions they pose for us we're like okay can we sort of scale this up to other villages within the wetland as well and then maybe it is a good idea to have those discussions with policy makers to then see what inputs we can use into wetland management for example so I think there's different ways to go here but we didn't explore that yet no but thank you for the suggestion okay thank you no worries and Anamika's question yeah so there is a question of Anamika in the chat let me read it for everybody so but what about the village-level institutions can they also implement some of these plans and how about building their capacity will that be more sustainable yeah no so definitely one of the things that we wanted to focus on during the pathways building process was the role of institutions and different actors that are responsible for implementing those institutions so there we said okay in a certain pathway if these are the actions that you have to take over time which institutions are needed for you to conduct that particular action or and which actors responsible for helping you with that so definitely there were definitely some areas where the local government could have facilitated a particular action within a pathway but overall there was so much of the transformation process that was driven by external forces so largely the urbanization process or the way that the wetland was changing for example that was really beyond the scope and the capacity of the village-level administration so in that way we felt that they were also limited in their adaptive capacity because of things that were at a much bigger scale and so that is really the challenge is that I mean I think that if you really wanted to move away from the business as usual towards a more sustainable or preferred pathway for example you really need to get government support because local adaptive capacity was limited in facilitating a move to a particular pathway that was largely the takeaway from the across the three villages I need to unmute I saw a thumbs up in the meantime from Anamika so thank you very much I see a hand raised by Mejo so please yeah yeah thank you for the presentation so I just wanted to know like how did the local power differences play out in both of the field size in the second project or the first one like in second project especially in the second yeah I mean there were definitely power dynamics between obviously the communities and the government actors and likewise even within the communities you could also see power differences between say for example in one case we had a fishing cooperative that had slightly more resources and capacity to adapt than individual private fishermen which were much more small scale or in another village then you have these power differences between you know people who had lived in the village a really long time and this new township that was being developed in the village so power dynamics did exist but I think that's one of the reasons why I think this pathways building approach was was nice because instead of having a workshop with all of these actors in the same place where such like power differences might play out in the way the pathways were discussed for example you could really have give each person a voice during the pathways building process and allow them to have share their own opinion in a very like let's say in a in a way that they also felt comfortable so I wouldn't say that yes there are power differences but they didn't impact the pathways building process as much because of how we conducted this one-on-one in successful rounds in yeah successive rounds I hope that answers your question yeah is this thank you thank you then I'm also just looking at the time and it's already passed for PM in the Netherlands but if there are more questions please hi hi hi I have one thing yeah hi I actually I can relate with this problem that you are talking about like the difficulties of the allocations of the public drinking water infrastructure because I am from Polkata also can I stay in Dadapur so you can relate this because Dadapur is an area I think you have taken the village of Thirnuria I think is in the Sonarpur area yes yes Sonarpur and Dadapur is very near to each other its two locations are very near at each other so in Dadapur we already facing some critical issues and with the water related crisis because most of the areas are actually contaminated areas so for that we need to buy water each and every day so so what's your suggestions regarding all this because power struggle we know that each and every area is definitely being with the power struggles power increases of powers are there political struggle is there so what do you suggest do you suggest the community involvement here or or any other uh a large holder policies stakeholder uh stakeholder policies like water conservation campaigns or like promotions of the water efficient practices both in industries as well as in the households so what's your solution on this this is one question and another thing is that I would like to know more about the Delfi methodology yeah so for the first question I mean the issue of this bottle water market that exists it exists in Thiruria it exists in not just in the Kolkata context but also in other peri urban context as well and so that is largely at least in Thiruria you saw in the first project we had to sort of change our strategy there with regards to how to discuss the problem because this bottle water industry was so powerful there that it actually caused quite a lot of problems for the local partners who were conducting the workshops but also the participants who were then engaged in our project so for that reason it it didn't we didn't feel safe sort of putting these stakeholders in for the risk which is why we pivoted to the arsenic aspects of the the problem but at the same time I think in West Bengal there is a recognition among decision makers or an awareness among decision makers that the bottle water industry is sort of out of control it is poorly regulated the question is how do you go about addressing that that is the part that that I don't have an answer for because that wasn't really what I thought that I think community community involvement maybe maybe is a good I want to say a good suggestion for it community involvement yeah it could just be like a better regulation from the higher level because there are definitely permits in place by which these industries have to set up but they are not operating so I think also better enforcement of institutions from different authorities like I don't know the state water the ground water investigation department or certain there are lots of researchers already taking place particularly in the Jadoop University for the arsenic contaminations and all that yeah yeah yeah I think the question is the lack of institutional enforcement at these areas that is also allowing these industries to continue and the second one about the Delphi method so in the last slide which I'll share the slides through yeah but in the last slide there is a paper that goes into the details of the Delphi method at least as it as we used it in the pathways building process so I would recommend looking at that paper for more on the methodology yeah okay thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you for the interesting question I see also the hand raised of Kuhn so as a final question for this webinar so Kuhn please yeah thank you everyone from Vietnam yeah thanks so much for your presentation I think this is really interesting studying both cases I have maybe a question related to the second study uh when you saw the let's say the bottom up approach where you do from Lino's and the state and then the national workshop so yeah I was no one wondering about the last one the last one the national workshop for policy development so my question is how you translate what is your fighting from the the next level and the local levels and then come up to to the policy is it like the same route you discussed and then no problem and yeah no so um our initial plan was to have these bottom to top level pathways building process but in the end we just focus only on the local level and build the pathways entirely from those actors perspective so we actually did not follow it up with any like say state or national level workshops what we did do was at the end of our project we had like a workshop where we invited people from another workshop a conference actually on peri urban issues more generally and we invited people from the national level and state level policy making arenas to attend that workshop and over there we we focus on a number of key peri urban challenges so that was water and sanitation that could have been disasters there's also I think a gender session so there were maybe four or five different peri urban issues that we dealt with at that conference and then in the session on like the water supply then that was the session where we presented the findings of our pathways building process from our project and there the idea was not for them to build on the pathways further but it was more so like an opportunity for us to build awareness on like a this is what is happening on the ground level because they are so disconnected from it in certain ways and B this is like an approach that you could take to do adaptive planning because of how uncertain the future is in you know in peri urban context so it was more like introducing them to a new approach for decision making and planning and on the other hand telling them about the ground level reality of what's happening across peri urban India but that was the only kind of higher level engagement that we did through the conference yeah right thanks so much no worries well thank you thank you Boone for your final question thank you Charlene for your all the answers that you have given and for your very interesting presentation I wanted to say that I also have a question but and I will ask it when I see you in Delft but then I was maybe realizing maybe that's not it maybe it needs to wait a little longer because well for I think it's not a secret that you are expecting a baby and that you're going on maternity leave at the end of this week so let's take the opportunity to wish you a very healthy final weeks in your pregnancy and an even better and more healthy start of being a young mother for your child so thank you very much thank you very much for your interesting presentation and I keep my question for another time let me then also share that in four weeks from now 15th of April we have the Brahma Putha note to share and present with us their research design for transformative change looking very much forward to that so with that I'm going to close this webinar thank you Charlene thanks everybody for participating and your interesting questions I found it very interesting and I would like to wish you a very nice day and see each other soon