نوع مقاله : نقطه نظر
نویسنده
چکیده
کلیدواژهها
موضوعات
عنوان مقاله [English]
This essay begins with the question of whether the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) provides an appropriate and sufficient framework for analyzing the complex challenges of water socio-technical systems. A review of the literature suggests that applications of MLP in the water domain have primarily focused on urban water sector and other human-made environments. By contrast, the application of MLP to water systems at broader scales, particularly at the watershed and national levels, has remained limited. This essay argues that, at these scales, hydrological and ecological processes are so deeply intertwined with socio-technical systems that conventional conceptualization of MLP do not adequately capture all the factors shaping transition dynamics. As a result, the explanatory and analytical capacity of MLP may be substantially constrained. The paper therefore asks how the entanglement between environmental processes and socio-technical systems can be made analytically visible within an MLP framework.
To address this question, the paper first reviews the relevant literature on transitions, water studies, and applications of MLP to the water domain. It then examines the theoretical problem of positioning hydrological and ecological processes within the hierarchical ontology of MLP. To address this problem, the paper proposes an extension of MLP that makes the interaction between socio-technical and hydro-ecological dynamics explicit. The paper subsequently examines the intellectual antecedents of such an integration in the literature of water studies and explores how a new understanding of this relationship can be developed in light of MLP transition dynamics. A conceptual model is then proposed. Finally, the transition from Iran’s relatively sustainable boneh–qanat system to an increasingly unsustainable system characterized by dams, deep wells, and commercialized agriculture in Iran during the period of 1960 -uptill now is examined as a case through which the analytical value of the proposed framework is demonstrated.
کلیدواژهها [English]
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