Elsevier

Research Policy

Volume 49, Issue 1, February 2020, 103841
Research Policy

Anchoring innovations in oscillating domestic spaces: Why sanitation service offerings fail in informal settlements

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2019.103841Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Proposes a context-sensitive and actor-centred approach to analysing embedding of innovations.

  • Context for users’ daily practices is conceptualized as oscillating domestic spaces.

  • Reflects the need to develop partial solutions when services are fragmented and unreliable.

  • Extends the conventional practice-theoretical analysis by operationalizing `time-space.’

  • Potential application in the Global North where service systems are becoming heterogeneous and user-centred.

Abstract

A persistent conundrum for practitioners and researchers in the development context is that, often, newly provided and improved basic services are not maintained by users despite seemingly superior functionality and user convenience. We argue that one major reason for this is an insufficient understanding of the context in which users have to manage their daily lives. We therefore propose an approach to analysing the embedding of basic services that focuses on the users’ daily practices. We do so by borrowing insights from ‘socio-technical transitions’ and ‘practice theory’ in developing our concept of oscillating domestic spaces. The concept reflects the need for people to constantly respond to quickly changing and precarious circumstances by rearranging their daily practices in time and space and developing a multiplicity of alternative options and partial solutions. We illustrate the analytical approach in a case study of sanitation access in informal settlements of Nairobi, Kenya. The analysis shows how the introduction of a container-based toilet resulted in partial embedding. The innovation anchored to only a part of the oscillating domestic spaces and was in disarray with the needs of users most of the time. The conceptual approach contributes to the understanding about how users take part in sustainability transitions as well as the added value of the time-space dimension in analysing practices in highly complex contexts. We conclude by reflecting on the potential applicability of the analytical approach to transition cases in the Global North.

Introduction

Around the world, actors are engaged in processes of improving basic service access and well-being for the one billion people living in informal settlements (slums1) (Ezeh et al., 2017, UN-Habitat 2016, Sheuya, 2008). These settlements in quickly growing cities provide fertile ground for innovation by presenting numerous challenging problems requiring solutions. However, the high level of complexity and multi-dimensional poverty defeats many hopeful attempts at rolling out novel solutions for hygienic, safe, affordable, and consistent access to water, sanitation, energy, housing or waste management. In this article, the starting point is the question: why do so many innovations introduced to informal settlements fail to embed and replace the existing practices that innovators see as undesirable? Attempting to understand this failure2 and what it takes for innovations to embed, we develop a conceptual approach that enables us to understand service provision and use from the perspective of users and their daily realities.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, the persistence of unequally distributed and unsustainable basic service systems result from a combination of historical and current processes, with institutional, economic, political, infrastructural, demographic and social factors creating a complex situation that is difficult to understand and tackle (Beall et al., 2010, Jaglin, 2016). Public utility actors often lack technical, institutional and financial capacities, sometimes also the motivation, to extend services into informal settlements (O'Keefe et al., 2015, van Welie et al., 2019a). These areas are often characterised by overcrowding, tenure legality problems, insecurity and high rates of unplanned expansions (Andersson et al., 2016, O'Keefe et al., 2015). Large-scale public service provision, such as utilities delivering electricity, drinking water and sewage systems, often reach only higher-income urban neighbourhoods, and there exists a patchwork of overlapping but fragmented and poorly aligned service systems that inadequately serve informal settlement dwellers (van Welie et al., 2018).

Sanitation, in particular, faces some of the greatest transformation challenges for Global South3 cities and, so far, there has been little progress. For example, the Millennium Development Goals for sanitation were not met by great margins (UNSD, 2015). Increasingly, public and private sector actors are engaging in the sanitation sector, attempting to provide alternative service provision models particularly in informal settlements. Compared to large-scale centralized models, decentralized and small-scale sanitation systems are suggested to offer possibilities for rapid installations, cost reductions, local adaptation to available spaces and to preferences, and possibilities for local experimentation and learning (Katukiza et al., 2012, Larsen et al., 2016, O'Keefe et al., 2015). However, while the potential merits of small-scale systems are many, the successes are few, with many not being maintained by users, failing to replace non-desirable artefacts and practices, and failing to scale up beyond pilot projects (Bhagwan et al., 2008, Lüthi et al., 2010, Sijbesma, 2006).

We argue that these failures result, to a large degree, from insufficient understanding of the context in which these innovations are introduced and from a lack of adequate engagement with users throughout the innovation process. Whereas conventional approaches to introducing new service options in engineering, economics and psychology are technology and product-oriented (Ockwell et al., 2018, Ramani et al., 2012), it is an established insight in development studies and socio-technical transition studies that innovation aiming at user embedding should be needs-driven and context-sensitive (Hansen and Coenen, 2015, Korten, 1980, Satterthwaite et al., 2015). In development practice, however, users are too often treated as either passive adopters in innovation processes, with their agency and roles overlooked, or are perceived as free-floating individuals making rational choices on a market (Dreibelbis et al., 2013, Letema et al., 2014, Ostrom, 1996, Schramm and Wright-Contreras, 2017). Furthermore, Ramani et al. (2012) and Rogers (2010) argue that there continues to be undue focus on the supply-side. The process of how new service offerings become appropriated and reshaped in the contingencies of everyday activities and by users with multiple, sometimes conflicting obligations, needs, and priorities, is overlooked and remains understudied. A combination of the shallow understanding of context and limited engagement with imagined ‘beneficiaries’ not only prevent well-tailored service offerings, but also lead supply-side actors to entertain somewhat unrealistic assumptions about the successful embedding of their solutions.

When Satterthwaite et al. (2015) analysed the progress framework for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), they found that it is still standard development practice to ignore contextual dimensions and the basic realities on the ground when setting objectives or undertaking interventions. They found that the entire statistical base for assessing progress within the United Nations’ targets on sanitation defines “improved provision” the same way for all areas, without concern for space and density, occupations, whether rural or urban, housing designs etc. Based on our own review on how the ‘sanitation ladder’ is specified in the SDGs, we find that it maintains a rather linear and mechanist categorization by specifying the following access levels: open defecation, unimproved, limited, basic and safely managed (WHO/UNICEF, 2018). Further, these levels are reached without sufficiently accounting for everyday precarities in service provision and access (i.e. if there is consistent provision of and access to sanitation). We therefore suggest that context is overlooked not only in practice but also in policy.

The aim of this paper is to contribute to a context-sensitive and actor-centred perspective on innovation processes by considering conditions for the successful introduction, acceptance, and embedding of new service offerings in informal settlements. We position ourselves in the literature on sustainability transitions. Our specific vantage point is a ‘socio-technical system’ which refers to a broad, but tightly interrelated, variety of institutional elements (societal and technical norms, regulations, standards of good practice, public opinions, and user practices), material artefacts, as well as agency in networks of actors dependent on each other (Fünfschilling, 2014, Geels, 2011, Markard et al., 2012). Transitions entail processes that lead to a fundamental shift in the basic configuration of a socio-technical system (Markard et al., 2012). In particular, we build on ‘socio-technical transitions’ and ‘practice theory’ to develop a novel conceptual approach to studying transitions in contexts characterized by high complexity, fragmentation and uncertainty as compared to the usual focus in this field—the centralised, stable and relatively homogenous sectors of basic service provision in OECD contexts (Fünfschilling, 2014, van Welie et al., 2018).

The main contribution of this paper is elaborating the concept of the oscillating domestic spaces, which makes visible how people are faced with constant fluctuations—expected and unexpected—in the conditions that enable service access. As people go about their daily tasks, they are forced to respond to precarious situations by adopting a multiplicity of complementary and partial solutions. This manoeuvring manifests itself in ongoing adjustments—i.e. oscillating daily space-time patterns—in how, when, and where practices are carried out. This has consequences for the potential acceptance and embedding of new innovations. We illustrate the virtues of this analytical approach in an empirical case study of sanitation in the informal settlements of Nairobi, in Kenya.

For scholars and practitioners involved in basic service delivery in informal settlements, the approach helps improve the understanding about the processes of embedding and inspires context-sensitive and needs-driven solutions. The approach suggests that there is a need to align expectations around success with the reality of users in low income areas. We argue that a careful consideration of the context in which people go about their daily lives leads to a more modest understanding of what constitutes a ‘successful’ innovation—reflecting the need for multiple and partial solutions rather than a silver-bullet approach.

Importantly, we think that the approach has significance beyond the empirical field of sanitation in informal settlements in African cities. There are two conceptual contributions to the literature on ‘sustainability transitions’ emerging from the analysis. First, research on transitions has often focused on purposeful interactions between state and market actors in their attempts to achieve certain goals. Considerably less attention has been directed towards understanding how demand-side actors in their everyday lives and activities are part of transitions to sustainability (Avelino et al., 2016, Fischer and Newig, 2016, Meelen, 2019, Wittmayer et al., 2016). The approach taken here, to place the daily practices of users at the core of the analysis, shows how relevant it is to understand their agency in order to identify the conditions for systemic change. In particular, we follow Ahlborg (2017) and Shove and Walker (2007), who have pointed to the risk that socio-technical system approaches that do not theoretically and methodologically pay attention to demand-side actors’ logics, roles, and practices could become overly technocratic and consequently disregarding or downplaying human needs, political struggles, and conflicts of interest inherent in societal transitions. The use of practice theory—which has already been operationalized within socio-technical transitions by several researchers—is helpful for counteracting this shortcoming (Shove and Walker, 2007).

Second, the literature on transitions has been developed based largely on empirical experiences in a few OECD countries and industrial sectors, and only recently have other geographical and sectorial contexts been explored (van Welie et al., 2018, van Welie et al., 2019b, Wieczorek, 2018). Our second contribution is, thus, to operationalize a practice-oriented approach to studying transitions in contexts riddled with uncertainty, heterogeneity, and fragmentation with regard to service provision arrangements. Our conceptual framework builds on the ‘time-space’ dimension of practices, which becomes more critical analytically in highly complex contexts. This is typical for informal settlements in Global South cities but may also be relevant for other contexts with similar characteristics.

The paper is structured as follows: The next section reviews literature on practice theory and its integration with socio-technical transitions literature, and also elaborates on the analytical approach we propose. Section 3 introduces the empirical case study of sanitation in Nairobi's informal settlements and describes the research methodology. The results section summarizes the case evidence and illustrates the complexities that informal settlement dwellers are confronted with daily when taking care of their domestic and sanitation needs. We highlight an attempt at introducing a new service offering, a container-based toilet, which had been envisioned by innovators as an in-house family toilet that would also solve the problem of ‘open defecation’ and ‘flying toilets’.4 Our analysis explains why the innovation became only partially embedded and why it didn't replace the problematic sanitation practices. We conclude, in Section 5, by discussing the practical and conceptual implications of the findings.

Section snippets

A practice-theoretical understanding of socio-technical transitions and limitations

Socio-technical transitions are processes that lead to a fundamental shift in socio-technical systems and involve far-reaching changes along technological, material, organizational, institutional, political, economic, and socio-cultural dimensions, as well as in terms of everyday user practices (Markard et al., 2012). In analysing the systemic changes that are triggered by innovations, practice theory is increasingly used as an approach that takes practices, rather than structural features or

Methodology

We illustrate our analytical approach in the case study of access to sanitation in informal settlements in Nairobi, Kenya. Nairobi is a popular site for innovative interventions in the basic service sectors. A growing interest by the private sector to complement the struggling public utilities has led to several novel sanitation innovations being piloted in the city (Kalan, 2011, O'Reilly, 2016, van Welie et al., 2019a), making sanitation in Nairobi an interesting case to study. We selected

Results

In Section 4.1, we provide the reader with a detailed picture and understanding of the context and preconditions for performing practices. We use the family house as the reference point; hence the family house represents the minimum domestic space extension. In Nairobi's informal settlements, however, various domestic tasks are undertaken outside—in front of the house, in the yard, or in public spaces such as next to the street, fields, pathways and at service-points. Small housing units, often

Discussions and conclusion

This paper contributes with a socio-technical, context-sensitive and actor-centred perspective to understanding embedding of innovations in highly complex and uncertain contexts. We used the empirical case of the introduction of novel sanitation service offerings in the informal settlements in Nairobi, Kenya. Motivated by the lack of adequate and safe sanitation for poor urban dwellers in sub-Saharan Africa, we started from the puzzle of why so many well-intended and seemingly superior service

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

We want to acknowledge the support and contributions of all members of SUSARA, the larger research project of which this study is part: Susanne Wymann von Dach, Heiko Gebauer, Christoph Lüthi, James T. Murphy, and Mara van Welie. We also want to acknowledge useful feedbacks received at the IST Conference in Manchester (2018), TIS seminar at TU Eindhoven (2018), the user innovation workshop at Oxford University (2018), the Global Economic Geography conference in Cologne (2018), and the Inno4sd

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