Cascading risks of climate change political and policy dynamics of water crisis: Consequences of modernity’: implications for transformative praxis

The chapter underlines the importance of sociological research across boundaries and the so-called Mode 2 knowledge production (Gibbons et al., The new production of knowledge, Sage, London, 1994) based on systemic approaches that span conceptual boundaries and support working across disciplines and sectors in order to respond to the cascading consequences of modernity and to address the new cascade economics (Pauli 2010) that maximise opportunities in new creative ways that flow from an ecosystemic approach. Giddens stressed in the ‘Consequences of Modernity’ that trust is contingent and that risks escalate when transfers are disembedded from local contexts and local controls. The systemically interconnected nature of social, economic and environmental danger and risks are explored elsewhere (McIntyre-Mills, Planetary passport, Springer, New York, 2017). In this paper, I draw on Giddens (The consequences of modernity, Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, 1990: 71) in terms of the crisis of trust and rising risk and discuss the water crisis in the city of Cape Town as a symptom of convergent challenges associated with the way in which the nation state interacts with the global economy, in line with the international division of labour and in the interests of military power and capability.