Contextualising urban sanitation solutions through complex systems thinking: A case study of the South African sanitation system

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dc.contributor.authorThatcher, Andrew
dc.contributor.authorPetrik, Leslie
dc.contributor.authorBiyela, Precious
dc.date.accessioned2025-10-29T09:53:37Z
dc.date.available2025-10-29T09:53:37Z
dc.date.issued2024
dc.description.abstractSouth Africa's urban sanitation infrastructure is unfit-for-purpose and collapsing, leading to significant environmental and health risks. Many alternative sanitation solutions exist, but their implementation has not produced successful roll-out to scale in this context. These failures are likely due to many interactive, systemic factors. This research adopts a transdisciplinary knowledge synthesis approach to map the possible systemic factors to provide engineers and policymakers with relevant information to identify contextual risk factors for potential failure and emerging problems and novel approaches. Building from the narrative literature reviews and the joint fact-finding approach, the sustainable systems-of-systems framework is used as the analysis tool to identify important elements of the complex systemic context. The output is a set of nine interweaved contextual constraints. The value of the contextual constraints is illustrated by application to three commonly implemented sanitation solutions (chemical toilets, urine-diverting dry toilets, and decentralised wastewater treatment systems) where relevant contextual components of the success (or failure) of the solutions are highlighted. The framework is not intended to replace existing linear-thinking decision-making tools, but to provide important contextual information to augment existing decision-making. © 2024 The Authors
dc.identifier.citationSheridan, C., Thatcher, A., Field, T.L., Hildebrandt, D., Kidd, M., Nadan, S., Petrik, L. and Topkin, J., 2024, October. Contextualising Urban Sanitation Solutions through Complex Systems Thinking: A Case Study of the South African Sanitation System. In 2024 AIChE Annual Meeting. AIChE.
dc.identifier.urihttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2024.142084
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10566/21217
dc.language.isoen
dc.publisherElsevier Ltd
dc.subjectEngineering-thinking
dc.subjectSanitation systems
dc.subjectSystems-of-systems
dc.subjectWaterless sanitation
dc.titleContextualising urban sanitation solutions through complex systems thinking: A case study of the South African sanitation system
dc.typeArticle

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