Caring for Our World
Making the Invisible More Visible: Gender Transformative Approaches in Water Resources Management
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Maria Carmona, Larry Swatuk
Women and water are strongly intertwined. Women know about water management and their knowledge, experiences, and priorities enrich sustainable management practices in the water sector. However, water projects have failed to recognize women’s needs and expertise in water management. Women also lack the power, claims, and rights to access water, because formal control over water lies with men. From the mid-1990s, ‘gender mainstreaming’ became a buzzword and was widely touted as a catalyst to achieve equality in the water sector. Despite some modest achievements, gender mainstreaming in water management has been reduced to ‘checking the box’ i.e., treating women as statistics or targets to be met in water projects, rather than allowing them to be an essential part of the development intervention. On the other hand, gender transformative approaches help to make visible the invisible—women’s needs, rights, challenges, knowledge, capabilities, and potentials. This paper shows that transformative approaches help to pave the way for the recognition of women’s rights and enable women to access and control assets and resources, share power, and be part of decision-making in water management. By hearing women’s voices and making the invisible more visible, we help women to become powerful agents of change for a more sustainable, just and equitable world.
Sustainable Development in an Aging World: Lessons from Chinese Elderly Migration Data
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Hasnat Dewan, Li Bo, Li Qihang, Fanqiang Meng
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development calls for action plans to ensure that the Sustainable Development Goals are met for all people. Therefore, it is imperative for a nation or a region to have pro-active sustainability policy for vulnerable and disadvantaged groups. Elderly people can be vulnerable for many reasons such as their health conditions, and wealth and income situations. The global elderly population (age 60 or over) is growing faster than all younger age groups, and their number is projected to be 2.1 billion by 2050. With the fastest-aging population in human history, the population over 60 years of age in China is expected to grow from 241 million in 2017 to 487 million in 2050. This study examines 4500 survey responses from the 2011 China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study and analyzes the factors affecting elderly migration, which has significant effect on their own and their family well-being. The elderly migration decisions are affected by the social security system, income needs, geriatric care facilities, medical insurance, marital status, role in the extended family, ethnicity, the level of education, and so on. By changing the age composition and the size of the elderly population in a region elderly migration also affects social investment, medical care system, consumption pattern, and overall economic development of the region. This study looks at the causes of elderly migration and its implications for sustainability in the world’s most populous country.
Participatory Value Evaluation : An Innovative Assessment Tool for Catalysing Sustainable transitions
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ruth Shortall
Policy-makers face socially and ethically sensitive problems which demand public participation methods in the policy process, but struggle to employ these effectively. Existing participatory approaches (e.g. town hall meetings or participatory budgeting) suffer from representation issues, high costs or high barriers to participation. On the other hand, traditional evaluation methodologies such as Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) have too a narrow focus to appropriately grasp the societal value of policy options, as they equate public and private valuations. The Participatory Value Evaluation (PVE) method exhibits promising innovations in terms of both participation and evaluation, which could help catalyse sustainable transitions. In a PVE, citizens design their future energy, circular or water system given such constraints as limited budgets or sustainability targets. Their individual choices are included in behavioural choice models that form the basis for policy evaluation. Several experiments have been carried out in different settings, but PVE needs further improvement before it can be applied in a general way by policy-makers. We seek to refine the participatory aspects of the PVE method so that it fulfils the demands of citizens and policy-makers alike. At the same time we hope to provide useful insights for other methods. We review the current limitations (and possible solutions) for top-down participatory methods used in ethically and socially sensitive decision-making. We also look to bottom-up approaches for inspiration with regard to the characteristics citizens might find desirable. In the light of our findings, we define research goals for the further development of PVE.
