Browsing by Author "Scott, Diane"

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    A flood of communications in a drought: a frame analysis of the City of Cape Town's communications during the 2017-2018 water crisis
    (2020) Hill, Erin; Scott, Diane; Taylor, Anna
    Like many other urban areas around the world, Cape Town, South Africa relies on governmental management authorities to ensure water supply. Recently, a three year drought from 2015 to 2018 caused a major water shortage, threatening water supply to the city. In response, the City engaged in multiple mitigation efforts, amongst which was a major communications campaign to inform the public and encourage conservation behaviour. Drawing on literature on water crisis management and framing theory, this thesis analyses how the water crisis was framed in communications made available online by the City of Cape Town (CCT) to the public between March 2017 and March 2018. To answer this question, the project adopted a frames study approach to determine the types and characteristics of communication items released by the City of Cape Town, as the water managing authority, during the recent water crisis. The study established that a range of frames were employed by the CCT in communicating the drought. Through an analysis of the trends in the framing of the water crisis messages the study further identified the shifts in framing and messaging throughout the water crisis response period. Six key frames were identified, namely ‘the City success story'; ‘obscurity and ambiguity'; ‘consumption is key'; ‘the situation is controllable'; ‘together we can beat the drought'; and ‘us versus them'. It was found that while there may have been a lack of strategic planning regarding public communications which resulted in conflated messages, the City's communications campaign was nonetheless effective in that it correlated with a significant drop in private – individual and household – water consumption which delayed Day Zero (when water supply would be cut-off and daily water rations would only be available at collection points for the public). The key implication of this study is that despite contradictions, idiosyncrasies and lack of planning, a heterogenous range of messages in communicating a crisis can reach and evoke appropriate responses from multiple audiences of the public.
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    Contesting transdisciplinary climate knowledge: a decolonial perspective on the FRACTAL project in Windhoek, Namibia
    (2019) Pelaez, Avila Julia Peláez; Scott, Diane; McClure, Alice
    Recent trends in sustainability research have particularly propagated transdisciplinary approaches in knowledge production. These new modes of knowledge production seek to deconstruct universalist principles and epistemic authorities from positivist research approaches. The potential of replicating existing power dynamics into these transdisciplinary spaces has, however, not sufficiently been critically questioned yet. This study proposes that transformative change in development of African cities requires a deconstruction of these power dynamics, that current transdisciplinary sustainability research is not yet sufficiently engaging in. To examine the power dynamics, the study applied a decolonial lens in its analysis. In a novel approach to contesting climate knowledge, the study sought to deconstruct the foundational concepts that are operationalised in the transdisciplinary knowledge generation. The analysis focused on tracing assumptions to identify imaginaries, that construct the geopolitical space and condition knowledge politics within a transdisciplinary research programme in Windhoek, Namibia. It further sought to reveal the mechanisms in the programmatic research design that condition epistemic authorities and subjectivities in the collaborative processes. Power dynamics were traceable through imaginaries as well as the evidencing of epistemic authority. Two overarching imaginaries could be traced, which are based in the construction and engagement of the geopolitical space in Windhoek: the imaginary of the social impact and desirable future and the imaginary of the sciencepolicy interface. Both imaginaries were underpinned by the vision of transformation, whose operationalisation revealed to be instrumental in determining the actual transformational potential in contrast to the envisioned one. The analysis indicated the concept of transformation to be an inhibiting factor due to uncontested power dynamics that were replicated in the transdisciplinary space. Epistemic authority was especially evident in connection with the climate information that was generated to inform the knowledge co-production. A contestation of authoritative knowledge was evident with regards to contextualising the information for present and future climates in Windhoek. However, the scientific climate information itself was not questioned for its authority. The conceptual design of the stakeholder engagement revealed to be the main mechanism that created subjectivity. The study concluded with an exploratory section, an ‘epistemic disobedience’, which engages the principle of Walking With that is used by the indigenous activist movement of the Zapatistas in Mexico to create a vision of a new world. Walking With is used to reconstruct a vision of a decolonial approach to generating climate knowledge in an African urban space. This exploration further exemplifies a dimension of decolonial criticism, which is the importance of going beyond deconstruction towards fostering decolonial thinking.