New grants to the Division!
We are happy to announce that the Division has recently received six new grants – from Swedish research agencies Formas, VR, and RJ, and also from UK’s ESRC-DFID. Warm congratulations to (RJ), (Formas), (VR and ESRC-DFID), (VR) and (Formas) who are the respective PIs! Brief summaries of the awarded projects below.
Colonial Natural Resources and Swedish Foreign Policy
The project explores, from a Swedish perspective, the interaction between two central features of what historians have called the "short twentieth century" (1914-1989): the unprecedented geopolitical turbulence during the period and the explosive growth of global natural resource extraction, supplying rapidly growing industrial economies. The project will contribute to new perspectives on Swedish foreign, security, and industrial policy, and to recent debates on the "colonialist history of non-colonialist countries." We will test three hypotheses: (1) that colonial natural resources became so important for Swedish industry that the government found it necessary to actively support Swedish involvement in what may be called “global resource colonialism”; (2) that the government made active use of colonial natural resources as a foreign policy tool in its efforts to build stable political relations with resource-rich countries and regions in the (post)colonial world; and (3) that Sweden’s neutrality policy and official status as a non-aligned country proved instrumental in strengthening Swedish (post)colonial resource interests. Using a theoretical framework built on the concepts of "strategic resources," "securitization," "economic vs. political levers," and "national styles," we explore the links between Swedish industrial and political actors in three resource-rich colonial regions: Africa, Siberia/Central Asia, and the Arctic.
Participants: , ,
Funding agency: Riksbankens Jubileumsfond
Time period: 2016-2018
The role of Local Innovation for a Transformative Shift towards sustainable Water and Sanitation in African Cities
Despite decades of reforms and numerous pilot projects, huge service inequalities persist in access to water supply and sanitation (WSS) in African cities. The WSS systems in Africa seem not to follow the historical development pattern of similar systems in the North, and existing change theories are ill-suited to African contexts. This project aims at developing and promoting knowledge about how local innovation can contribute to a transformation of these systems for a more equal access. Our research involves case studies in three cities in Uganda and Kenya, focusing on WSS in low-income areas including technical as well as organisational innovations. We combine secondary sources with primary data collected in the field. The case studies will help us to adapt existing theoretical models to the African city context, based on three leading theories on change and innovation: Large Technical Systems, Multi Level Perspective and Strategic Niche Management. We will analyse how well local innovation connects with existing socio-technical WSS systems, and contextual factors such as societal values, economy, human rights etc. The project is carried out over three years by two researchers from KTH, combining expertise on Africa, water and sanitation, history, technology change and innovation. We have secured collaboration with University of Nairobi (Kenya), Makerere University (Uganda) and SLU (Uppsala). We intend to collaborate with UN Habitat and SIWI in our communication activities.
Research team: , KTH, Department of Philosophy and History, Pär Blomkvist, KTH, Department of Industrial Economics and Management.
Funded by: Formas, Forskningsrådet för miljö, areella näringar och samhällsbyggande
Duration: 2016-2019
Urban infrastructure challenges of the South: Waste and sanitation research in Ugandan cities to develop theory and methods for heterogenous infrastructure
The Swedish Research Council decided on the 3rd of November to fund a multi-disciplinary team from Sweden, Uganda, South Africa, UK, and USA to develop crucial knowledge about urban infrastructure challenges in Africa and the developing world. The team—with Drs Henrik Ernstson, Mary Lawhon, Shuaib Lwasa, Jonathan Silver and David Nilsson—will focus on waste and sanitation and they bring together world-leading institutes and a North-South advisory team. The project will use a political ecological framework to understand sustainable transitions based on everyday experiences among the poor, while linking to higher-level policy levels and regional discussions.
Research team: PI: (PI), KTH Royal Institute of Technology (SWE) & University of Cape Town (SA); Co-Is: Dr. Shuaib Lwasa, Makerere University (Uganda), Dr. Jonathan Silver, Durham University (UK), Dr. Mary Lawhon, The Florida State University , (USA), (SWE).
Funded by: The Swedish Research Council (VR, Vetenskapsrådet) as a development research grant previously administered by Swedish foreign aid agency SIDA.
Project duration: Jan 1, 2016- Dec 31, 2018.
Advisory board: Professor Edgar Pieterse and Professor Susan Parnell (Univ of Cape Town), Professor Garth Myers (Trinity Univ), Dr. Colin McFarlane (Durham Univ), and Proferssor Awadhendra Sharan (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi).
Contact: Mary Lawhon or Henrik Ernstson and see website for more information about Situated UPE.
Turning livelihoods to rubbish? Assessing the impacts of formalization and technologization of waste management on the urban poor
This three-year project will examine global trends in waste management which are reducing access to the livelihoods generated from waste for the urban poor. Diverse environmental concerns and awareness of the financial benefits of waste are contributing to the formalisation, the financialisation, and the use of technology in waste management. Doing so changes labour relations, which could improve health for the urban poor, but simultaneously undermines livelihoods developed around waste and recycling. We will examine four specific interventions in South Africa in Durban/eThekwini, Johannesburg and Cape Town to understand competing claims to waste and its costs and benefits, and the governance processes through which these claims are adjudicated. In parallel we will undertake desktop research on waste management trends in Ghana and Uganda to increase the comparability of our research to other Sub-Saharan African countries. Our conceptual frameworks are informed by urban political ecology and development studies.
The project will be based at the School of Environment and Development at the University of Manchester in collaboration with the Department of Geography at The Florida State University, the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town and KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory in Stockholm. The project starts in November 2015 and runs until October 2018.
Research team: Principal Investigator: Erik Swyngedouw (University of Manchester); Co-I: Mary Lawhon (The Florida State University); Co-I: (University of Cape Town, KTH Royal Institute of Technology).
Funder: ESRC-DFID (Poverty Alleviation);
Project duration: Nov 2015 to Oct 2018
The India-China Corridor
This project studies the formation of polities in the region that connects India and China, conceptualised as the India-China Corridor, during the formation of the British Empire in Asia. It focuses on two related aspects: the role of natural conditions and the impact of human mobility in the geopolitically sensitive and highly volatile Corridor. It takes a long-term view across the intermediate and transformative century 1820-1920 when the British and Chinese empires expanded their influence in this region. In contrast to studies of contemporary North-East India as an interlocked enclave bounded by national and international conflicts; through historical enquiry, the project will investigate the larger region as characterised by mobility. The project poses urgent questions about the causes of intra-regional migration, the formation of rights, and socio-ecological conditions. What are the historical and contemporary social and natural forces that shaped this key-zone of India-China relations?
The project is theoretically pioneering because it introduces the concerns of the new field of Borderland Studies into debates in environmental history, legal history and social anthropology. Its methods combine fieldwork and historical documents from archives in four countries. It will develop the concept the India-China “Corridor” to better analyse complex histories across long time-periods. The project will also provide a new approach to the drivers of geopolitics and economic transformation with historical depth in a core area of rapid change in the world today.
India and China – the world’s two largest societies – are today emerging as global powers. This makes understanding the interconnections between the giant neighbours an urgent task for the social sciences and the humanities. This project therefore brings together an international team of leading historians with matching and complementary expertise on the large India-China Corridor. This Corridor is rapidly transforming and will be completely restructured when the interconnecting highways and pipelines are completed. Understanding the dynamics of this crucial region in Asia in a historical perspective is essential for realistic assessment of the present and future planning.
P.I.:
Funded by: Swedish Research Council (VR)
Project duration: 4 years from January 2016
Understanding marine environmental change: ocean narratives from 1950 to the present
Oceans are key indicators of global environmental change and play a central role in the earth's climate, especially the high seas with its vast volumes of water. At the same time, the high seas are a difficult environment for us to address, govern and protect. Marine scientists argue that the way we have understood the oceans in the past needs to be radically changed in order to facilitate more and better marine policies and protection. To effect that change, we need not just new science and technologies, but also profoundly new stories that can transform how we regard the sea. Such stories encounter several critical challenges. The oceans are very different from terrestrial environments, where many kinds of degradation are directly visible to local communities and give rise to public outrage, campaigns and debate. Invisible, complex and evasive changes in the ocean on the other hand, such as acidification, rising temperatures and loss of biodiversity, can be very difficult to apprehend and imagine. Meeting these challenges involves not only social, political and juridical questions of ocean governance, but also questions relating to representation, perception, imagination and justice. To address these, this project studies framing narratives and ideas in recent non-fiction ocean literature in relation to contemporary societal and academic developments of environmental thought.
P.I.:
Funded by: Formas (mobility starting grant for young researchers)
Duration: 2016-2020