Why social engineering approaches fail to solve socio-political problems

A lot of the reform agendas in the field of natural resource management are framed by natural scientists and engineers. Molinga, Meinzen-Dick and Merrey show why their approaches often fail as they don’t keep the the political and network nature of water resource management reform in the picture:
Politics, Plurality and Problemsheds: A Strategic Approach for [...]

New Case Study Online!

The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) has extensively supported the construction, rehabilitation and governance development of small multi-purpose reservoirs in northern Ghana. But what are the effects of these investments on local water governance? Who controls the local Water Users’ Associations? How do users deal with conflicts of interest around the scarce resource water, [...]

Words can kill

“You can use Net-Map to get a better understanding of and maybe even negotiate positions in conflicts.” That’s something I would say in a talk… and be delighted to discuss afterwards, what the potentials and limitations of this method are. People who work with violent conflicts have warned me – and rightfully so – that [...]

Drawing a Net-Map about Water and Sanitation Issues in Bolga

Representatives from non-governmental organizations, traditional authorities and government agencies in Bolgatanga, the regional capital of the Upper East Region of Ghana, map and discuss, who can influence the sanitation behavior of local people. Bicycle ball bearings serve as locally available influence tower pieces.

Accomodate different styles of thinking

I have an extremely bad memory. When I try thinking about complex multi-layered political situations, a bad memory means that even though I might have an extensive knowledge of all the details, I fail to see the complete structure, because I can only think of one aspect of it at a time. When I move [...]

How can we stop the people from doing this?

I asked the participants of our Net-Map workshop in Bolgatanga, Ghana, what pressing issues out of their own work they would like to explore. This was a group of regional and district level government officials and representatives from NGOs, all somehow related to the water sector, concerned with drinking water, agricultural water use and nature [...]

Notes from the field

I have arrived in Ghana now. The goal of this stay is to learn more about teaching Net-Map to groups of policy makers and researchers. I will facilitate two seminars where groups and individuals are encouraged to learn Net-Map by doing. The reason for this approach is twofold:

My research audience is new to the method. [...]

Network Basics: Centralities

When I first got interested in Social Network Analysis, I lived in Bolgatanga, a small town in northern Ghana. As far as I knew, I was the only one of the 50 000 inhabitants of Bolga who had ever heard of the term or was even faintly interested in the concepts. I learned again, what [...]