Relational Praxis in Transition Towards Sustainability: Business-NGO Collaboration and Participatory Action Research

Submitted by Rupesh Shah

For the degree of PhD

of the University of Bath

2001

Copyright

Attention is drawn to the fact that copyright of this thesis rests with its author. This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with its author and that no quotation from the thesis and no information derived from it may be published without the prior consent of the author.

This thesis may be made available for consultation within the University Library and may be photocopied or lent to other libraries for the purposes of consultation.

Table of Contents

	ABSTRACT	2
	ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS	4
	TABLE OF CONTENTS	7
	TABLE OF FIGURES	9
1	INTRODUCTION - (99kb)	10
1.1	Focus of thesis	12
1.2	Reading the thesis	14
	SECTION I: CONTEXT	20
2	SUSTAINABILITY, PARTICIPATION, CHANGE AND POWER - (142kb)	20
2.1	Sustainable development - puzzle or crisis?	20
2.2	Transforming anomaly: orienting to co-optation and entrenchment	24
2.3	Looking at change and power through the lens of an organic metaphor	26
2.4	Dominant ontology and epistemology	30
2.5	Constructing the world anew	31
2.6	Experiencing the world anew: a participatory worldview	32
2.7	Relational praxis and sustainability	34
	SECTION II: RELATIONAL PRACTICES - (38kb)	37
3	COLLABORATION BETWEEN NGOS AND BUSINESSES - (213kb)	38
3.1	Enabling Factors	39
3.2	What collaboration?	51
3.3	Process, Process, Process	55
3.4	Remembering the wider story 3: academic meta-comments	62
4	COLLABORATION IN INQUIRY FOR SUSTAINABILITY - (175kb)	70
4.1	Primacy of the practical?	70
4.2	Expert knowledge, power and locally grounded forms of knowing	72
4.3	Critical subjectivity and first-person research/practice	75
4.4	Critical intersubjectivity and second-person research/practice	79
4.5	Subjectivity-objectivity and third-person research/practice	84
4.6	Self-criticality, praxis and powerful actors	87
	SECTION III: METHODOLOGY	93
5	FLOW OF INQUIRY - (151kb)	93
5.1	Early footsteps	94
5.2	Contact with participants and reflective interviews	97
5.3	Nigeria visit and personal writing	100
5.4	Case write-up and development of learning history documents	102
5.5	Writing and reflecting upon the learning history	106
5.6	Beginning to make sense of this all	110
	SECTION IV: PRAXIS - (80kb)	113
6	THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LIVING EARTH AND SHELL - (155kb)	118
6.1	Seeds of relationship	122
6.2	Crises for Shell International and Shell Nigeria	124
6.3	A problem solving relationship: the unfolding of engagement	127
7	SHELL-LIVING EARTH LEARNING HISTORY - (196kb)	138
7.1	Selection of Living Earth communities	140
7.2	Emergence	148
7.3	Change	152
7.4	Abundance	161
7.5	Helping others	168
7.6	Participation	173
7.7	Points emerging from internal learning history workshop at Living Earth	180
8	A RESEARCH/PRACTICE LEARNING HISTORY	182
8.1	First cycle : starting the PhD to writing the case study	187
8.2	Second cycle: after provision of first drafts of case study to current moment	222
9	SHELL AND LIVING EARTH - SOME CONCLUSIONS AND REFLECTIONS - (107kb)	242
9.1	A network of relationships	242
9.2	Deeper levels of connectivity	251
	SECTION V: ANALYSIS AND REFLECTIONS - (35kb)	253
10	THE DOUBLE-BIND IN RELATIONAL PRACTICE - (162kb)	255
10.1	The pragmatics of human communication	256
10.2	Axioms of pragmatic communication	258
10.3	The double-bind	259
10.4	Shell, Living Earth and society - a network of double-binds	261
10.5	The ambiguity of communication	269
10.6	Research-relationship bind	272
11	THE THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION AND THEORY OF SYSTEM AND LIFEWORLD IN RELATIONAL PRACTICE - (228kb)	278
11.1	Critical Theory and Communicative Action	278
11.2	Theory of System and Lifeworld	280
11.3	Symbolic reproduction in NGO lifeworlds	288
11.4	Colonisation by the backdoor	294
11.5	NGOs as system catalysts engaged in change efforts with powerful actors	300
11.6	Research/practice and my experience of boundary crises	305
12	FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS OF PARTICIPATION? TOWARDS ECOLOGICAL AND COSMOLOGICAL PARTICIPATION FOR CRITICAL THEORY OR "SERIOUS PLAY" - (183kb)	309
12.1	Looking at the system and lifeworld as a double-bind	309
12.2	Self in transition	314
12.3	Pragmatising communicative action and critical theory	317
12.4	Communicative action in everyday life	318
12.5	Towards understanding communicative action as an ecological and cosmological being	319
12.6	Participation and sustainability	328

REFERENCES -	338
APPENDIX A: EARLY CONCEPT MAP - (95kb)	360
APPENDIX B INTERVIEW LIST - (83kb)	361
APPENDIX C: LIST OF CODES FROM GROUNDED ANALYSIS OF DATA - (54kb)	363
APPENDIX D: WORK IN THE NAME OF THE DELTA - (177kb)	365
APPENDIX E - RESEARCH PROPOSAL TO LIVING EARTH AND SHELL - (87kb)	366
APPENDIX F - INTERVIEW MAP - (89kb)	368
APPENDIX G - MIND MAP FOR "CHANGE" THEME - (166kb)	369

Table of Figures

Abstract

This research looks to enable an exploration of participatory relationships involving powerful actors as part of a transition towards sustainability. A range of organisational and individual actors are currently seeking to engage in social system change towards environmentally sustainable and socially just ways of being. Some of these efforts can be defined as attempts to develop collaborative relationships with powerful actors for system catalysis. Located in the context of the emergence of a participatory worldview, my inquiry explores two such forms of relational practice: first, the collaboration between Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) and businesses and second, the collaboration between knower and known in inquiry.The first empirical track centres upon collaboration between Shell and Living Earth (an NGO). This track was informed by a "learning history" which I undertook that sought to develop the story of the interaction and foster reflection within the organisations. The second track regards my collaboration with Shell and Living Earth as a learning historian and system catalyst. My presentation of the relational practice explores the challenges of system change for powerful actors and looks to enable the reader to engage in their own inquiry regarding these challenges.My analysis uses two theories of the pragmatics of communication - Bateson’s double-bind and Habermas’ communicative action. I suggest that tangled webs of communication exist in NGO-business collaboration which result in internal organisational challenges to participation. Attempts at system catalysis by NGOs mean that the sector is faced with paradoxes about their relationship to the system they seek to change. As a result, such collaboration is likely to promote only first-order change in line with the unsustainable project of neo-liberal economic growth.

My own experience suggests that changing understandings of "self" in postmodern society have epistemological intimations for the engagement of powerful actors. In particular the shift concerns a transformed relationship between the human and more-than-human worlds and the need to expand our ways of knowing in a universe reconceived as animate and multiply constructed in relationship. The epistemological shift suggests that, beyond organisational efforts at developing relationality for sustainability, important work for transformation needs to be done by individuals through on-going praxis that can forge renewed understandings of the self-world relationship. It also suggests a way in which a corporate/business discourse that has defined sustainability as a global management project predicated upon the provision of technical solutions by the elite can and must be transformed towards a participatory and reflexive play of learning by all individuals.

Acknowledgements

The ongoing struggle of peoples of the Niger Delta is the background against which this inquiry has been able to flower; the research would have no meaning were it not for the women, children and men of these communities and others like them around the world who are striving for a more benign, just and ecologically grounded human presence on the planet. In addition to the communities, I am indebted to all the other people who have taken part in my inquiry at various stages. I owe special gratitude to the participants at Living Earth and Shell for their engagement, reflection and time and without whom the inquiry would not have been possible. Thank you also to all the members of other organisations who took part in my inquiry at various stages and to Muyiwa Odele for his assistance in Nigeria. I am grateful to the members of CARPP and the MSc here in Bath for letting me drop in to their conversations and add my two cents worth and from whom I always received more than I could put in. Thank you to Jem, your own inquiry has been a source of inspiration. Thanks to Judi Marshall and Hilary Bradbury for the valuable feedback they provided in examining my thesis.I must acknowledge David Ford for bringing me on to the Ph.D. programme in 1997. Since then Juani, Roberto and Sandy, you have all supported me tacitly, philosophically and in my "life" cycling! Juani, thank you for always coming up with the right words at the right time. I have no clue where I would be, Roberto, without the systems diagrams and the comfy cushions, so cheers. I should also remember Ibrahim; we all had fun that first year (whiteboards, desks, table football, office stationary and lettuce). Thanks to Kate for bringing celebration to our community; our six monthly check-ups have been extremely health-giving and you have made my personal inquiry flourish. Piera, all I can say is synergy is when "bicycle goes into Mini, remainder me". Thank you Philippa for coming along with new energy right towards the end. Amy, thank you so much for being here in Bath, especially during this last year - your support and presence (as well as a regular lunch at Metropolitan) have kept me going.Neha and Anudharan, I am glad that I have been able to share your journeys in parallel and that you showed me the way! Thanks to all my other friends and family who have supported and humoured me all the way - Meena, Vaishali, Eleesha, Michelle, Murtaza, Ruth, Minal, Sejal, all of the "Malta posse", Vishaal and so many others here in Bath and elsewhere. I owe special thanks to Ashvind and Praveen; you are the best friends I could ever ask for. Prav, your enthusiasm, support and readiness to listen to my ramblings these last few years and especially recently have sustained me. Ash, cheers for always being there and letting me revel in my craziness and excitability!Peter, your passion for inquiry is something that I shall take from my time here and guard with the kind of light attention that you hold so well. Thank you so much for taking me on in the first place and then for always engaging so fully in my transition.I am immensely grateful to my family - I love you all. Ansu, thanks for always being there, strong and sure; your presence is reassuring and inspiring. Rami, thank you for staying up with me until I-don’t-know-what-time to ensure that I finished that geography project all those years ago; your passion for doing things right will always flow deep within me. Finally, Mum, the stillness with which you approach life always amazes and inspires me and your concern for and attention to the environment has been immensely important in giving me direction; without you I would be so small.

Michaami Dukhadam For Dad Once you look at the extravagance of the universe and in particular the planet Earth it baffles the intelligence but the imagination delights in it.Thomas Berry

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