The Place Lens in Problem Solving

(wrote this on LinkedIn — reposting here for wider reach and discourse)

(Get a coffee, this will be a slightly longer one)

As I travelled across parts of the Northeast of India — Bodoland and Meghalaya specifically (here’s a link to the Twitter thread where I captured the journey, pics and insights as we travelled) — I saw opportunity that Schedule 6 offered, and how it’s used differently. I also saw peoples still a lot in touch with their land, and with some level of ownership intact. Got me thinking about how we jump straight to problem solving and leave out critical steps and actors along the way, leading to poor outcomes.

Here’s a raw early-thoughts approach to the various aspects to address issues and opportunities in a place.

Ownership

This is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for any change that is long term and sustainable.

Organisations and governments trying to come up with solutions, schemes or programmes to help a place often forget to have a conversation with the owners of a place, to get their inputs and to be responsive to felt needs rather than having to “intervene”.

The question of ownership goes much, much deeper than “consultation” or a conversation or even PRAs done in the context of a problem-focus. An analogy I quote often is about how you have ownership of all issues at your home — across income, food, education, leisure, the wifi, expenses, etc. Say, at the dinner table, a discussion around the health of a particular member, or decisions that impact overall health come up. You then decide to involve experts — the doctor, or a plumber, or yoga instructor, or whatever path and set of solutions you choose at the table. You certainly don’t expect or want these experts to keep joining you at the dinner table and leading the conversation for you, do you?

Today, beyond the home (and sometimes inside it too), ownership has weakened as we’re all encouraged to be consumers of both the market and the state. Over time, this results in loss of decision making ability, agency and imagination, and the collective is easily exploited for external interests in the worst case, or subject to siloed motivations and decision making in the best case, often with unintended outcomes and debt accrued along other dimensions than the one being solved by the expert.

Ownership — as custodians — of one’s places — villages and panchayats, city wards, river basins, forests, tech and industrial parks, etc, is crucial if we have to truly create stronger places, stronger communities and a better living planet.

How does one find, foster, enable better ownership that’s truly looking at all aspects of place? Who does it include? How do they sit together, baseline, benchmark and decide together.

As enablers in the social sector, the roles we can play

• Facilitate community driven recognition of their place’s ecological, cultural, and historical identity
• Build deep social capital and agency by investing in local leadership, traders, youth groups, and knowledge keepers
• Support narratives that rekindle pride in local ecosystems and strengthen emotional connection to land and water, local skills, knowledge
• Avoid external ownership models; instead, ensure the region’s people truly feel they “own” both the problems and the solutions

Understanding

Ownership without a good understanding of place can be poor, or even extractive and harmful to place.

Places, expressed through the more techno-managerial “land use” but ideally encompassing much much more including culture, histories and part of the living world we’ve not yet figured out, have many facets, many dimensions to them. Some of these matter to and intersect with human needs and aspirations as well, and we form a relationship with the place. Without understanding places — culturally, scientifically, through data — across all their dimensions, the relationship turns unhealthy.

As the pressure of populations and market led aspirations has increased, the understanding has weakened and the relationship has become extractive, toxic and eventually harmful for the communities living there as well.

Understanding a place can happen across multiple dimensions that represent it — the natural assets — in soil, water, biodiversity, the institutions that managed these, the knowledge and skills we have in place that allow for a healthy relationship while serving human needs, the breadth of livelihoods and consumption linked to these, health and nutrition, the community’s own consumption and expense baskets as markets play an ever bigger role in place, and so on.

As we live our lives, run projects, try new things and ideas, there are trade-offs across these. That’s what owners with a good understanding of place do well — make better trade-offs. Experts, problem solvers in siloes, governments etc cannot do this well for each place and context, and it’s the bad trade-offs that we see add up to many issues we face today, including the climate crisis.

Again, as facilitators and enablers, our role needs us to

• Blend scientific assessments (soil health, hydrology, biodiversity) with traditional ecological knowledge
• Build local youth and community capacity for data collection, analysis, and storytelling
• Map risks and opportunities in terms of ecological boundaries, not administrative lines
• Use participatory research to understand the place and system holistically, rather than just diagnosing isolated issues

Action

This is where we usually start! Obviously the most critical step to actually get anything done, but without the earlier pieces in place, can often be pointless at best and counterproductive at worst. Philanthropic efforts bringing in a specific set of expert led solutions and chasing specific goals and outcomes, government schemes doing the same, often without contextual sensitivity or design, and even innovators and entrepreneurs very focused on the narrow problem they are trying to solve all operate like this, and rightly so — specialists must focus on their craft and area of expertise.

But this must operate through where ownership of the place lies, and in response to felt needs there, not as an intervention. This is something that’s often bypassed and despite great intent and a lot of effort and money spent, we get sub-optimal outcomes.

Also, in project mode, great methods, tools and ideas are limited to the geography and community where the project operates, and often for the duration it operates.

What’s really needed is a wider availability (platformized?) of proven ideas, with context defined, to changemakers and owners in place who can then stitch up their own solution journeys from those based on their unique context, felt need and motivation.

As enablers focused on local strengthening for the long term, on better trade-offs we need to

• Enable decentralized, terrain specific action plans that are created by the community
• Create stacks of support (technical, financial, narrative, restoration, etc.) that changemakers can pull from based on need
• Focus on integrated action livelihoods, agroecology, water, forestry, restoration, rather than isolated sectoral interventions
• Prioritize actions that build regenerative economies and reduce dependency on single projects or schemes

Governance/Institutionalisation

This is critical for the long term sustainability of any set of solutions or approaches. There used to be debates even at Rainmatter Foundation around supporting and working with actors on the ground vs those creating larger frameworks, pushing policy, data and research. Over time, this has resolved as we’ve understood not only the need to work with “all of the above” but also the need for each to inform the work of the other, make use of it in their own work.

Action on the ground, without formal structures and deeper, wider belief does not grow or sustain beyond the few pushing it in their context. Similarly, policies and scheme out of sync with the needs, motivations and realities on the ground don’t actually create change except accidentally. With more dialogue, coordination and reconciliation across these layers, we’ll do better.

Finally, the governance layers have to see themselves as enablers and not primary actors. The centre of gravity of decision making must move as close to the place and it’s true, honest owners and custodians to the extent possible.

The role we’re seeing that enablers play here

• Establish local, participatory governance models preferably rooted in bioregionally relevant identities (not just district or state frameworks, but of course in sync with them)
• Build infrastructure for equal conversations among actors like community, government, experts and funders with transparency and accountability
• Encourage governance structures to allow for iteration, learning, and adaptation based on evolving ecological and social realities
• Foster interoperability across programs and funding sources to avoid fragility of dependency on single policies or donors

To summarize, before we start to act, and try and reform or improve governance, it’s critical to find or foster ownership, and work through it. And without the owners having a good understanding of place multidimensionally, the ownership itself can go wrong and one doesn’t see stewardship of our places, and adding up, the planet. It’s where we are today, overall.

Looking forward to comments, experiences, examples of where some or more of the above have been done well (we’ve pieced all this together from partners doing it in bits and pieces on the ground and would always love to learn more)

(This also starts to delve into our approach to creating the theses. I’ll write another article on that in a bit. Stay tuned.)