In pursuit of arrangements that work:Bricolage, practical norms and everyday water governance

Cleaver, Frances (2015) In pursuit of arrangements that work:Bricolage, practical norms and everyday water governance. In: Real Governance and Practical Norms in Sub-Saharan Africa. Taylor and Francis Inc., pp. 207-227. ISBN 9781138852587

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the concept of institutional bricolage to explore how practical governance arrangements are formed in everyday life. It suggests that the concept of bricolage can be used to analyse the ways that practical norms and practical hybrids are produced. The chapter analyses the formation of practical norms and practical hybrids from an institutional bricolage perspective. It presents a case study of water management in one village in Zimbabwe and explains how ordinary people maintain local water infrastructure. The chapter also focuses on selected processes of bricolage including the everyday improvisation and the exercise of agency; the wider meanings embedded in pragmatic arrangements; and the ways in which such arrangements are structured, particularly through processes of authoritative legitimization, often producing inequitable outcomes. The combination of path dependence and improvisation in social arrangements means that they have the potential to reproduce existing inequalities of power and to challenge them.