Time to change: the foreseeable future for water planning

“The decisions people make, and the actions they take, depend on how they conceptualize and experience time. This fundamental and influential factor is seldom acknowledged, little understood, and rarely considered explicitly in planning; be that for the material systems or the knowledge systems in the water sector. The objectives of the research that is described in this thesis were (1) to characterize similarities and differences in the Time Perspectives of people working in the water sector worldwide and (2) to theorize about how this temporal ambiguity influences, and can be used for, water planning and setting research agendas. First an interpretive framework was developed including a model of Time Perspective, which was designed to make clear the most fundamental assumptions about the (relationships between) aspects of an individual’s Time Perspective that influence the decisions they make and the actions they take. This model builds on explicit foundations from Critical Realism and brings together psychological theories of motivation and internal time
consciousness. The model formed a framework that was used to develop the Foreseeable Future Multi-measure Method. This new method was designed to characterize relevant aspects of an individual’s Time Perspective in an integrated fashion. It is a structured interview with five successive steps that are sequenced to account for socially acceptable responses and to facilitate triangulation:”

(Citaat: Segrave, A.J. – Time to change: the foreseeable future for water planning)