20 August 2018 - 07 September 2018
Universities of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and Limpopo, South Africa

Risk researchers to provide expert inputs for SASAC

Junko Mochizuki and Piotr Magnuszewski will lead an interactive training at the SASAC ‘s high-level systems analysis capacity strengthening program for emerging researchers.

© Sam Erwin | public domain

© Sam Erwin | public domain

The program consists of lectures, seminars, and workshops covering themes in the social and natural sciences, including policy dimensions. It is targeted at early-career researchers and aimed at exposing participants to experts in systems analysis.

Junko Mochizuki (RISK) and Piotr Magnuszewski (RISK and WAT) will organize a two day training focused on soft-systems analysis methods including social simulation, in which they will be playing the Nexus Game exploring the complexity of water - food - and energy nexus and participants will be given hands-on assignments to design their own soft- systems analysis research projects.

As opposed to ‘hard’ problems for which clear system boundaries, objectives and constraints can be identified, many policy issues facing today are what we call soft-, complex- or wicked- problems. These are policy issues for which problem definitions, system boundaries, objectives and constraints are hard to define or contested, requiring researchers to delve deeper into problematic contexts. This includes historical and governance backgrounds in which problem(s) have emerged and diverse and contested stakeholder views on problem framings and preferred policy options. A number of methods are available to unpack these problematic contexts including some of the innovative stakeholder engagement approaches currently being developed at Risk’s Governance in Transition Research Area.

The 3-week event will be implemented by a consortium of four universities, namely the University of the Western Cape, the Universities of Limpopo and the Witwatersrand, and Stellenbosch University and was funded by the Department of Science and Technology through the National Research Foundation of South Africa.


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Last edited: 27 August 2018

CONTACT DETAILS

Junko Mochizuki

Senior Research Scholar Water Security Research Group - Biodiversity and Natural Resources Program

Piotr Magnuszewski

Research Scholar Water Security Research Group - Biodiversity and Natural Resources Program

Research Scholar Equity and Justice Research Group - Population and Just Societies Program

PUBLICATIONS

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
Schlossplatz 1, A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria
Phone: (+43 2236) 807 0 Fax:(+43 2236) 71 313