Abstract

Climate change-induced changes in the availability and security of water in Southern Africa require new innovative forms of approaches. Therefore, sustainability innovations gain momentum as they aim to promote forward-thinking adaptation processes to these consequences. These highly context-specific innovations form the core of this SP as they strive to normatively and sustainably change established, institutionalized social action practices. The overarching objective is to analyze comparatively the spatio-temporal dynamics of organizational and institutional transformation pathways in Namibia, South Africa and Columbia, associated with the emergence and implementation of complex sustainability innovations.
Processes and actors form the centre point of the three research questions:

(1) how is knowledge anchored in different cultural, socio-economic and ecological knowledge domains, integrated and transferred across heterogeneous organizations, social and spatial scales in adaption processes,
(2) how and in which ways are institutional dynamics shaped at local, regional, national and transboundary scales (e.g. multi-scalarity) to foster adaptive water governance systems?,
(3) How do transnational networks (e.g. GWP SA, SASSCAL), international organizations, intermediary and science-based organizations contribute to these processes?