School of Sustainability Graduate Culminating Experiences

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) is a non-profit organization that prides itself in “responding to the world’s worst humanitarian crises”. Through its New Roots program, IRC is using an aquaponics urban garden incubator site “to train refugee farmers in aquaponics agriculture and good business practices in the United States.” The site is an example of the conversion of brownfield into “healthfields” and sustainability and resilience initiatives including the Year of Healthy Communities Program-2017, the Maricopa County Food Systems Coalition, and other community health initiatives that involve major partners including the City of Phoenix.

Entering into the next development phase, IRC wants the site to be an opportunity for demonstrating some of the most innovative approaches to water reuse while contributing to a sustainable food network in the neighborhood and in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area. One component created to support this goal is an intervention manual identifying water-sensitive design strategies and ways to scale or transfer to other IRC sites. As such, my project identified and framed guidelines for the selected strategies to use in addition to steps for scaling, transferring, and creating a “location” where all of this information could be held for future reference. The manual content was created around each strategy which included identifying general legal practices in Phoenix related to each strategy, defining key terminologies, detailing water budgets, and research gaps to overcome.

The Woarani of the Pastaza Province in Amazonian Ecuador face complex pressures both externally and internally to develop. While there are both positive and negative impacts associated with this transition, it remains a problem that development solutions designed external to the system they’re meant to impact risk imposing asymmetries on that system. This research explores the case of a culturally and historically embedded boundary organization operating at the nexus between Western academics and two communities of Woarani in the Pastaza Province of Ecuador. Through unstructured and semi-structured interviews, field- observation and social and historical research, this study seeks to understand: 1) the pathways to development for the Waorani, what and why they choose what they do and, 2) in the context of the I-W boundary at the field school site, the elements of development that are critical for sustainable scaling. Key findings include eight elements that explain development at the field school and situate the school as a boundary organization. Another important finding is the support for sustainable scaling, that in this context, sustainable scaling is modeled by organic growth along known networks of relations.