News Archive
New paper by Cámara-Menoyo and McInerny: Co-designing grounded visualisations of the Food-Water-Energy nexus to enable urban sustainability transformations
A new paper from CIM members Carlos Cámara-Menoyo and Greg McInerny, along with João Porto de Albuquerque, Joanna Suchomska and Grant Tregonning has just been published in Environmental Science and Policy
The paper, "Co-designing grounded visualisations of the Food-Water-Energy nexus to enable urban sustainability transformations" tackles a particularly significant knowledge gap in the Food-Water-Energy nexus by presenting the experience, decisions and lessons learnt from the co-design process of an interactive tool to visualise these complex interrelations for a particular case: food choices in kindergartens in Poland.
To make the FWE nexus understandable and actionable for the various stakeholders, our approach had two distinctive features: 1) grounding the FWE nexus following a pedagogical/Freirean approach that connects to lived experiences and problematises frames of references to activate transformation; and 2) the use of data visualisations to critically enquiry and learn about the nexus. The combination of these features resulted in data visualisations that “ground” FWE nexus by connecting to lived experiences and problematising frames of references to open transformation pathways.
The outcomes demonstrate a shift in perspectives towards the FWE Nexus that resulted from the design process and the interaction with our visualisation tool. Although further investigation is needed, we see it as a first step to opening new data-enabled transformation pathways to sustainability, not only through improved individual choices, but also by enabling new collective action, change of policies and organisational procedures, as well as new governance arrangements.