Anchoring innovations in oscillating domestic spaces: Why sanitation service offerings fail in informal settlements

The provision of basic services represents one of the core challenges for sustainability transitions in rapidly growing cities of the Global South. A persistent conundrum for practitioners and researchers is that often new offers are not adopted and maintained by users, despite seemingly superior functionality and user convenience. We posit that one major reason is inappropriate understanding of the context where users have to manage their daily lives. We propose an analytical approach to assess the sets of practices informal settlement (slum) dwellers build up to fulfil their daily needs. The focus on practices provides a middle-ground perspective between under-socialized accounts that see users as isolated rational actors and over-socialized accounts which expect highly routinized behaviour prescribed by cultural and economic structures. We posit that informal settlement dwellers have to cope with oscillating domestic spaces, by which we mean that people need to constantly rearrange daily practices in time and space, and to develop response strategies, in order to accommodate quickly changing practice preconditions. We illustrate the framework by a case study on introduction of a container-based sanitation service option in informal settlements of Nairobi, Kenya. This analysis shows how innovations often anchored onto only a very small part of the complex domestic space, and was in disarray with the actual needs - when a systemic, middle-ground, perspective is not considered. By this, we contribute to the understanding of how users have to be conceptualized in sustainability transitions, and to a more elaborate understanding of the space-time by analysing a highly complex context for practices. We conclude by arguing that the conceptual framework can be applied to a wide variety of transition cases, also in the Global North.