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Making an impact, Case 1: project PROVIDE
Demonstrating the societal relevance and impact is an increasingly important part of social scientific research. The Environmental Policy Group has developed a series of ‘impact case studies’ to highlight how our work goes beyond the walls of academia.
Environmental Policy group researchers were asked to answer four questions in the development of their impact case studies: What was the problem? What did we do? What happened? Who did we influence?
This week: project PROVIDE.
The multi-disciplinary research project Partnership for Research on Viable Environmental Infrastructure Development in East Africa (PROVIDE), funded by INREF, ran from 2006 to 2012. PROVIDE aimed to contribute to the understanding and improvement of environmental infrastructures, notably in sanitation and solid waste management. The main emphases in the project were put on developing the key concept of ‘modernized mixtures’ and on establishing relationships with (representatives of) key societal actors and institutions that are involved in the design, maintenance and use of the urban waste and sanitation infrastructures and chains.
PROVIDE was a collaboration between Wageningen University in The Netherlands and three universities in East Africa: ARDHI University in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Kenyatta University in Nairobi, Kenya; and Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. The project brought together scientists in the fields of environmental policy, environmental technology, development economics and environmental system analysis. Throughout the project the involved researchers made efforts to learn from their partners in other disciplines, so that the interdisciplinary knowledge-base could serve as starting point for recommending new policies and practices in the field of solid waste and sanitation in urban settings.
You can read more about the research design, societal relevance and impact of project PROVIDE on this page.