Empowering Stakeholders’ Communication through Place-Specific Solutions for Water Governance in Gurugram, India

Geographers are increasingly called on to tackle complex social and environmental problems and link knowledge production to action. Building on coproduction and participatory action research approaches, this article makes a case for using Transformation Labs (T-Labs) as a methodological platform for engaging diverse stakeholders in knowledge coproduction and emphasizing the interconnectedness and complexity of contemporary urban sustainability challenges based on nonhierarchical communication. The insights presented in this article stem from a larger transdisciplinary project that focused on community-based, participatory action research in Gurugram, a satellite city of New Delhi. Through iterative engagement activities, the T-Lab process provided spaces for engaged communication between different stakeholders and moved beyond information sharing to encourage collaborations between communities and other stakeholders to co-design solutions to specific water management issues in the city. We argue that designing T-Labs as a communicative space for knowledge coproduction and co-designing solutions enables geographic communication to be viewed as a relational activity to foster a more collaborative and democratic approach to communicating and engaging with complex sustainability challenges.