Designs

Overview

Given the challenges of complexity and dynamism – whether social, technological or environmental – many now established concepts and approaches require conceptual, methodological and institutional rethinking.

Opening up enquiry

Newer concepts of resilience, robustness, flexibility, legitimacy, diversity and agility offer important opportunities for the design of appropriate decision-making procedures, appraisal methods and analytical tools. To be effective, these must be applied reflexively taking on board their own role in power dynamics. In responding to dynamic systems, such approaches must ‘open up’ enquiry and deliberation, rather than ‘close down’ options.

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Explainer: Designs

• Addressing how decision-making procedures, appraisal methods and analytical tools shape the capacity for negotiating pathways to Sustainability.

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STEPS work on Designs

Building on existing work on appraisal, deliberation and participation the STEPS Centre's design theme will produce the following outputs:

• Assumptions and principles: A comparative reflection on the assumptions and principles underlying existing institutional designs, and associated methods and tools, for the appraisal and management of environmental, technological and development issues, asking how the intersection of systems dynamics and governance processes are addressed.
• Frameworks, methods and tools: The design of a new suite of appraisal frameworks, methods and tools which enhance the capacity to respond to complex systems dynamics and site-specific particularities, and foster stakeholder-led negotiation of pathways o sustainability.
• Typology: The development of a typology of the contexts, scales and phasing under which different designs are appropriate, asking what works where, when and why.
• Power: An understanding of the contemporary relations of power and expertise associated with the use of different methods and approaches to policy processes and citizen engagement, and the implications for rethinking institutional designs.
  

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Working Paper 3: Empowering Designs

• Empowering Designs: towards more progressive social appraisal of sustainability (pdf 2,311kb)
  By Andy Stirling, Melissa lEach, Lyla Mehta, Ian Scoones, Adrian Smith, Sigrid Stagl, John Thompson

The challenges of designing new frameworks for social appraisal aimed at sustainability and social justice are reviewed by this paper.

• Download this paper (pdf 2,311kb)
• Order a copy of paper from the IDS bookshop, cost £5.00 per paper or order the set of seven STEPS titles for £20.00
• Read a summary of this paper

This work is licenced under a
Creative Commons Licence.

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Research Projects: cutting across domains & themes

• Crop, disease and innovation in Africa - focussing on dryland Kenya, maize and farming system dynamics in areas affected by climate change.
• Urbanisation in Asia - urbanisation and sustainability in Asia's growing cities, on the expanding peri-urban fringe of a major city, indicative of conditions for an increasing proportion of global poor.
• Rethinking regulation -addressing the gap between current assumptions about regulation in the cases of drugs, seeds and water in China and Latin America, and more complex realities.
• Risk, uncertainty and technology - how different institutions and groups frame and respond to risks and uncertainties in areas of rapid scientific and technological advance.
• Epidemics, livelihoods and politics - HIV-AIDS, SARS, avian flu, BSE - procedures for addressing epidemics that support rather than compromise poor people and support social justice.

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Related research, ideas & items

• 'Measuring Cultural Diversity - a heuristic approach from science and technology policy'. View presentation by Andy Stirling given in December 2008
• Participation, power and progress in the social appraisal of technology - by STEPS co-director Andy Stirling
• Reframing Resilience The STEPS Centre's theme for 2008 is resilience; engaging with resilience thinking and exploring practical implications for policy in agriculture, water, peri-urban dynamics, epidemics and regulation.
• Knowledge, power and politics in environment and development. STEPS director Melissa Leach gave this year's Linacre Lecture at Oxford University. She explored how and why policy approaches to environment and development problems conflict with user knowledge and argues for alternative approaches taking human-ecological dynamics seriously.

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