Luke Whaley

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Researh Fellow at L’Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD)

Despite cogent critiques and limited successes, community-based management (CBM) remains central to policies for natural resource management and service delivery. Various approaches have been suggested to strengthen CBM by ‘working with the grain’ of existing social arrangements and relationships. For advocates, such approaches ensure that manageme...

This study examines the performance of the policy of community management for rural groundwater supply in Africa. Across the continent, policies that promote community management have dominated the rural water supply sector for decades. As a result, hundreds of thousands of village-level committees have been formed to manage community boreholes equ...

In recent years, ‘critical institutionalism’ has emerged as a school of thought in its own right. Among its strengths is a focus on institutions as both complex and embedded, where institutional change is understood as a process of bricolage. Yet a number of distinct challenges follow from this. These include capturing the ‘complex-embeddedness’ of...

Adaptive governance continues to attract considerable interest in academic and policy circles. This is with good reason, given its increasing relevance in a globalized and changing world. At the same time, adaptive governance is the subject of a growing body of critical literature concerned with the ways in which it theorizes the social world. In t...

As attention increasingly turns to the sustainability of rural water supplies - and not simply overall levels of coverage or access - water point functionality has become a core concern for development practitioners and national governments, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. Within the long-enduring Community-Based Management (CBM) model this has r...

This article highlights one important reason why attempts to achieve sustainable development through community management often fail-the neglect of worldviews. It addresses a gap in existing research on institutional bricolage by focussing on the core role that beliefs and rationales play in resource governance. Our research into rural water supply...

Water governance research is confronted with a messy world that is difficult to make sense of. Mainstream policy approaches tend to simplify and standardise this messiness in ways that obscure complexity, power and politics. As a result, these approaches not only promise more than they can deliver but often end up reproducing unequal and iniquitous...

People’s livelihoods involve entering into relationships with others. These relationships typically establish themselves as relatively stable arrangements; rule-structured interactions that we inherit, adopt and adapt. Examples include the rules and norms for owning and accessing land, selling one’s produce in the market, or running a taxi service....

A survey on the functionality of boreholes equipped with hand pumps was undertaken in five districts in Malawi in 2016. The survey aimed at developing a robust evidence-base of the performance of hand pump boreholes by applying a tiered assessment of functionality: (1) working at the time of survey (2) producing the design yield of the borehole; (3...

This report communicates the findings generated from one of the project surveys – deconstruction and forensic analysis of 50 individual water points in Malawi. The report presents the new data generated to Malawi’s groundwater resource potential; the nature and condition of hand-pump borehole installations; and the significance of both of these fac...

This report communicates the findings generated from one of the project surveys – deconstruction and forensic analysis of 50 individual water points in Uganda. The report presents the new data generated to Uganda’s groundwater resource potential; the nature and condition of hand-pump borehole installations; and the significance of both of these fac...

Where do tendencies to exclude, discriminate, and dominate originate from? Why for many do harmful traits like these appear so characteristic of modern life? How might we move beyond this predicament to foster more sustainable and enriching relationships with one another and with Nature? In this paper, I explore the classic geographic concepts of s...

Water management is set to become increasingly variable and unpredictable, in particular because of climate change. This paper investigates the extent to which water policy in England provides an enabling environment for ‘adaptive co-management’, which its proponents claim can achieve the dual objective of ecosystem protection and livelihood sustai...

The challenge of managing water resources in England is becoming increasingly complex and uncertain, a situation reflected in many countries around the world. Cooperative and participatory forms of governance are now seen as one way of addressing this challenge. We investigated this assertion by focusing on five farmer irrigator groups in the low-l...

Participatory and cooperative forms of water governance have become regular features of government discourse and stated policy objectives in England. We consider this aspiration from the perspective of farmers in the English lowlands, by analysing the current power dynamic that exists among these farmers, and between them and the key stakeholders i...

In this paper we use discourse analysis to explore the current dynamic that exists among farmer irrigators in England, and between irrigators and water managers in order to understand the potential for co-management to develop. To do this we employ two concepts from the field of critical discursive psychology - 'interpretive repertoires' and 'subje...

Scholars of comanagement are faced with a difficult methodological challenge. As comanagement has evolved and diversified it has increasingly merged with the field of adaptive management and related concepts that derive from resilience thinking and complex adaptive systems theory. In addition to earlier considerations of power sharing, institution...

Since 2000 a number of community-driven sanitation approaches have emerged that counter a historical trend to subsidise the provision of latrines to the poor. This study reports on a set of findings and conclusions concerning the effectiveness and sustainability of two such approaches operating in Zimbabwe, the community health club (CHC) approach...