Developing T‐Shaped Water Professionals: Building Capacity in Collaboration, Learning, and Leadership to Drive Innovation

摘要

Change has been an increasingly central theme in water management since the 1980's and early 1990's. During this period the need to integrate different aspects of water resources management to effectively provide benefits and avoid problematic trade-offs across sectors, across different groups of peoples or environmentally became a significant focus of concern. The concern resulted in the Dublin Principles of 1992 and much subsequent research and action under the banner of integrated water resources management (IWRM) (Lenton and Muller 2009). IWRM can be interpreted as a movement focused on change – change in the way that water policy and management decisions are coordinated, undertaken and implemented, either institutionally, sectorally, or geographically. In this sense integration in water (resources) management isn't a state of being, rather it is a process of changing states of being (J?nsch-Clausen and Fugl 2001).Focus on change in the water sector has continued to grow since the 1990's. Since then significant trade-offs between water uses (supply, ecological support, food, energy) for limited resources have become apparent and are now well recognized. These trade-offs include limits to electricity generation from a lack of available water for evaporative cooling power stations (PMSEIC 2010) and substantial increases in the water required to produce a unit of energy for transport as a consequence of crop-based biofuels being substituted for increasingly scarce and costly oil (World Economic Forum 2011). Our water systems require energy, our energy generation systems require water, our food systems require both water and energy for production and transport, and we (the world) seem to be reaching limiting trade-offs between these systems in terms of the underlying water resource – the so-called water-food-energy nexus. Water supply and food shortage crises are now ranked as the highest likelihood and highest impact social risks facing the world (World Economic Forum 2012). In an increasingly water- limited world as a consequence of population growth and changing rainfall patterns, the need to radically change the way in which essential services – water, wastewater, food, energy – are managed and delivered in a more integrated way has been argued for strongly (World Economic Forum 2011).Beyond the details of the water-food-energy nexus, a growing body of literature in water management highlights the need to focus on better understanding and consequently managing processes of institutional and organizational change rather than focusing on technological improvement as one key to realizing sustainability goals (Brown and Farrelly 2009; Spiller et al. 2012; 2013; Thomas and Ford 2005). The broader sustainability literature has also focused on the need to better understand and manage the processes of change, or innovation, which are required to bring human activity into alignment with the “safe operating” bounds of planetary biogeochemical cycles and processes (Doppelt 2003; Leach et al. 2012).For the ambitions of these writers, and more generally, of integration in water management to be realized, education forms a natural focus. Education constitutes an essential process for building the capacity of water sector professionals, and of professionals in sectors where water is either a major input (e.g., food or energy) or potentially subject to major negative impact (e.g., the ecological impact of urban stormwater runoff – see Walsh et al. 2005), to: Recognize the need for innovation.Develop innovative ways of changing that avoid creating problems elsewhere (geographically, sectorally, or to other groups of people).Stimulate and drive processes of change.But what should education programs for building such capacities focus on? Although innovation is a relatively new scientific field, with the first papers traceable to the work of Schumpeter in 1936 and 1942, the field has grown quickly, particularly since 1990 and now has an activ