I’m applying to the MSCA fellowship again, sucker for punishment. My current draftsummary as of 10 august is:
| AquaCurious: Cultivating Curiosity-Driven, Gameful Coalition Culture for Sustained Civic-Led Water Partnerships. I ask what capacities let civic and intermediary actors contribute to, rather than draw down, the care that sustains coalition-based water governance, and then work to design gameful approaches to nurture these capacities. AquaCurious bridges three fields: polycentric governance, gameful design, and feminist ethics of care, treating care-laden coordination labour as a design principle rather than a diversity problem to legitimise afterward. The design of a pocket park in Tampere serves as vehicle, anchoring the development of a design framework through iterative, workshop-tested engagement, using deep canvassing and behavioural coding of curiosity and cognitive labour. Gameful approaches that inspire the design include parkrun, already studied elsewhere as a coalition-governance actor and World of Warcraft guilds as holding structure. Outputs include a practitioner toolkit, ritual-template infrastructure recommendations, and a specific policy recommendation aimed at municipalities to pre-institutionalize mechanisms for intermediary and civic-actor participation. This proposal is aimed at converting my demonstrated but institutionally unrecognised leadership into sustainable, fundable independent practice. |
The proposal essence in point form:
Polycentric governance is a way to deal with climate change, but currently mainly focuses on institutional actors. They’re too constrained to deal well with the climate chaos.
The civic sector is well placed and more experienced to deal with complexity. Local government is closest to the civic sector, and so capacity building in this coalition building is an important thing to do.
Gameful communities are structurally more similar to the civic sector than the institutional actors that governance literature focuses on.
However, the civic sector is having a crisis of participation, which I instead call a transformation. This is because of two things:
We’ve lost trust in government.
The nature of knowledge and expertise is changing.
Curiosity can help rebuild trust and navigate knowledge.
In this project I want to improve collaboration in groups, improve the quality of participation, improve coalition work, in other words “cultivate the holding structure that makes participation attractive”
A holding structure needs two ingredients to work: a ritual container that shapes the culture of the group, and coordinating labour that sustains its actual functioning over time.
Gameful approaches have explored how to do this ritual structure – for example World of Warcraft guilds and parkrun.
How to cultivate the coordinating labour is less well studied. Curiosity can help cultivate this skill.
AquaCurious uses curiosity as the mechanism to make civic-water coordinating labour become a shared, teachable, and sustainable practice rather than an invisible cost borne by one person until they burn out.
for fun, a new logo idea.