(Dis)empowerment and inclusiveness in upscaling a transnational niche experiment. Kajjansi Junction Programme as a case study.

Abstract

The idea of experimentation has recently influenced the debate on sustainability (Sengers et al 2016), and has been associated with the creation of alternative socio-technical trajectories wherein societies can prosper. Transition studies have substantially contributed to this debate (Loorbach et al. 2017) – yet several problems remain in dealing with developing countries (Wieczorek 2018), where transitions are often purposively driven through what this thesis calls ‘transnational niche experiments’. Research on scale-up of these experiments is limited to a few studies. Thus, to enrich the debate further, two variables focused on agency are developed: (dis)empowerment is revisited as a set of cognitive and discursive processes that (dis)enable the niche to enter the process of creating, gaining and mobilizing valued resources within and beyond the experiment; inclusiveness is reconsidered as the qualitative set of dispositions of an initiative which foster participation and multivocality of local hitherto excluded actors’. The operationalisation is pertinent to a ‘transnational niche experiment’, with two levels of practices, and an actor typology. In response, the theoretical work aggregates and test various contributions in an integrated framework for the analysis of (dis)empowerment of and by actors and inclusiveness of practices in a transnational niche experiment. Analysis of documents pertaining to a specific niche and an action research approach are used to explore these actors and practices in an urban experimentation, more specifically in Kampala, Uganda. After field observations during a six month internship programme, the research accepts the overall hypothesis that (dis)empowerment in and of a niche of actors may have an influence the inclusiveness of practices. These links have just been explored here, and further theoretical integration of the concepts combined may lead to a theory on ‘inclusive experiments’ which accounts for (dis)empowerment at the intrinsic level of actors and the (dis)empowering effects of specific discourses.