Expansive Learning and Transformative Agency in an @RiverCommons Formative Intervention in South Africa

• In Event: Formative Interventions for Justice, Futurity, and Sustainability

Abstract

Objectives
There is an urgent need to find collective learning approaches to address pernicious policy contradiction in South Africa that officially supports Citizen-based Water Quality Monitoring (CBWQM) activity, but persistently fails to support it. South Africa is a dryland country with all of its water resources allocated. It is experiencing substantive water quality management challenges (river pollution), exacerbated by a failure in monitoring capacity. South Africa also has 60% youth unemployment, and the possibility of mobilizing youth skills and capacity for CBWQM is under-explored. This paper seeks to understand how these intersecting challenges can be addressed through formative intervention research @River Commons.

Theoretical framework
Recent developments in an emerging fourth generation of cultural historical activity theory, (Engeström & Sannino, 2020; Sannino, 2020) and its potential for elaborating complex forms of collective learning and agency are of particular interest to this study. Engeström and Sannino (2020) explain the unit of analysis in fourth generation CHAT as “heterogenous work coalitions aimed at resolving wicked societal problems” (cf. also Sannino, 2022). This @RiverCommons formative intervention study involves three intersecting types of heterogeneous coalitions (HCs): primary (HCs of CBWQM monitors - youth learning to ‘work for the common good’); secondary (HCs of influential intermediaries e.g. NGOs, research institutions), and tertiary (HCs of policy and economic system actors); all of whom are engaged with the intersecting wicked problem of water quality management and youth unemployment in South Africa.

Methods and Data Sources
Three change laboratory interventions involving actors from the 3 HC types were catalyzed and documented. Mirror data and double stimulation tools were generated through historical and ethnographic data that included reviews of CBWQM practice, survey data involving 60 CBWQM primary HCs, research and evaluation reviews, questionnaire data, and in-depth policy contradictions analysis. Analysis focused on systemic contradictions, expansive learning processes and emergence of transformative agency by double stimulation (TADS), and expansions of the object. In focus is the use of second stimuli in nexus Change Laboratories where all HC types were present.

Results
TADS were catalyzed along at least four different, yet intersecting CBWQM development pathways. These include TADS focusing on 1) CBWQM tool production, improvement and use (primary and intermediary HCs), 2) co-development of a skills development programme for youth involved in CBWQM (primary and intermediary HCs), 3) co-development of a blended finance model for funding the CBWQM activity (intermediary and tertiary HCs), 4) release of state funding for piloting a ‘work for the common good’ CBWQM youth employment programme (intermediary and tertiary HCs).

Significance
The tracing of the TADS processes along these four pathways offers further insight into how wicked problems can be addressed via the dialectical educational model of transformative agency (cf. Sannino, 2015, 2022). The significance of nexus Change Laboratories and use of double stimulation tools with power to both bridge and transform intersecting types of HCs work is emphasized in this contribution.

Author

• Heila Lotz-Sisitka, Rhodes University
  Presenting Author