Part 4 (2/2)

* Local abuse of power granted by community-based disaster risk management to local actors, which can lead to community fragmentation.

* Resistance from local elites when community-based disaster risk management is perceived as a threat to the status quo.

* Difficulties for implementation in unstable communities facing economic or political stress.

* Difficulties for implementation on a larger scale, and related limits on the a.n.a.lytical and policy applications generated by community-based disaster risk management.

* A failure to link with broader and/or longer-term development priorities and activities.

* The generation of inequality as some neighbourhoods build resilience through community-based disaster risk management while others remain vulnerable.

* The lack of local success stories to act as examples for scaling-up and replication.

These challenges to the repeating of success are likely to apply across policy fields, to other contexts where progressive external actors seek to build local adaptive capacity through empowerment methods. Specific challenges were also reported from those actors who had attempted to support or lead mainstreaming, scaling-up and replication of local successes.

Mainstreaming in governments and communities faced distinct challenges. For governments, seeking support for community-based disaster risk management and its outputs led to compet.i.tion with other priorities and required a framework to link efforts between local and national actors.

Local communities needed inst.i.tutional channels to establish dialogue with the government, particularly about risk perception, diversity within the community (social and economic) and legal ent.i.tlements to risk reduction.

Scaling-up required a functioning inst.i.tutional infrastructure and so was most likely to be found within a supportive, inclusive and open governance system.

Replication was also be found where central inst.i.tutions were supportive but did not rely on this. It can provide a means of reproducing good local practice when governance systems are unable or unwilling to support scaling-up. In urban slum settlements and isolated rural communities beyond the reach of the state, expansion through horizontal replication was undertaken where existing networks of community actors and organisations could provide the inst.i.tutional framework for replication.

Community-based disaster risk management was found to be most successful when local actors, local leaders and government representatives led and worked together. Where this was possible, it maximised opportunities for mobilising joint action. Furthermore, partners.h.i.+ps led to additional benefits from the extension of local resources and the building of generic human capacity as local actors turned from beneficiaries to planners and advocates taking on rights and responsibility for local risk management.

Where there was an inst.i.tutional framework to support bottom-up initiatives, this enabled local actors to feed into a.n.a.lysis and interventions designed to address structural issues related to national-level vulnerabilities. These plans were otherwise beyond the reach of community-based disaster risk management and at times conflicted with it. The major challenge for reproducing community-based disaster risk management was how to successfully encourage sustained governmental involvement set against competing budgetary pressures and with the potential that bottom-up innovation may challenge existing norms and practice.

Source: ProVention Consortium (2008) Oxfam and the Red Cross, and networks of local development organisations such as GROOTS and local NGOs. All had experience of attempting to reproduce the success of pilot projects that had a.s.serted the rights of local marginalised actors (predominantly the poor and women). All were also the product of local action inspired from the outside and top-down (albeit from progressive civil society actors) and were not initiated locally. The lack of local innovation is a key aspect of vulnerability indicating a lack of adaptive capacity. It is also a challenge for external agencies that seek to facilitate local actors in the building of capacity. Experience indicates this is a long process requiring generational s.h.i.+fts in att.i.tudes and individual ident.i.ty. But extremes of poverty and now also the urgency of climate change put pressure on progressive, external actors to accelerate this process.

An important message from Box 4.1 is the difficulty experienced by external actors seeking to stimulate innovation and diffusion. In low-income countries where the market has limited reach only the state has the scope and resources to spread innovations throughout society, but is resistant to change. In this context, transitions unfolded over time and with uncertain trajectories, the majority of innovations never extend beyond local impact. For those that did, at some point transitions became coordinated either strategically through a lead actor, like the state agency, or as a convergence of the visions and actions of diverse groups (Geels and Schot, 2007) a.n.a.logous to a social movement.

The interaction of local innovation with the wider regime in shaping transition is a repeated theme summarised by Geels and Schot (2007) into five transition pathways (see Table 4.1). Each is a specific outcome of the interaction between local innovations and the wider regime. The pathways have been renamed in Table 4.1 to better draw out the salient characteristics for transitions in regimes.

Climate change acts as an external pressure on the regime through changes in markets, international regulation, aid and trade flows as well as environmental risk. Local adaptations can then potentially be inserted into the regime to meet these new challenges as a means of strengthening the status quo following moderate impacts (weak cooption), or after catastrophic change in a search for the realignment of the regime to a new external environment (innovative subst.i.tution and innovative compet.i.tion), until a new round of challenges emerge. The framework was designed to account for change in broad patterns of production and consumption. In so doing it arguably over-emphasises the role of top-down pressure and external triggers and underplays the internal compet.i.tion between Table 4.1 Transition pathways.

Pathway.

Characteristics.

Stability.

In the absence of external and internal pressures there is limited scope for local innovations to affect change in the regime, though they can act as a resource against an uncertain future.

Top-down reform.

Moderate external pressure is acted upon by regime actors rather than local innovators to change the direction of regime policy and practice from within.

Weak cooption.

Unchallenging local innovations are incorporated by the regime but their adoption triggers unforeseen adjustments to the regime.

Innovative subst.i.tution.

Catastrophic external pressure shows the regime to have failed. A single innovation has already been developed and can be inserted into the regime.

Innovative compet.i.tion Catastrophic external pressure shows the regime to have failed. Multiple innovations compete for dominance until a new stability is achieved.

multiple viewpoints on development that persist even during periods of perceived stability and can rise to challenge existing inst.i.tutions and regimes.

There are parallels between transitions theory and the resilience framing of adaptation as discussed in Chapter 3. Both identify critical moments for adaptation as a tension between innovation in sheltered s.p.a.ces, be it niches or the shadow systems; and subsequent efforts to influence across the system of interest, be it the organisation or governance regime. This is not surprising: both approaches draw on system theory differing in the scales and contexts of application. In organisations and in wider society potential for capacity innovation is indicated through learning processes, social networks, communities of practice and advocacy coalitions that seek to modify inst.i.tutional structures to allow wider diffusions of innovations (Pelling et al., 2007; Smith, 2007). Both point to a creative optimum where top-down resources such as political will, financial and technical support are available but without undue oversight so that local actors can be left to experiment, even to take risks in doing so, with the benefit to the wider system of generating an array of ideas and practices. The necessity for a coalition of local and higher-level organisations and interests to enable diffusion is a central message from these literatures, demonstrating the limits of autonomous and spontaneous adaptations.

Urban regimes and transitional adaptation.

This section aims to ill.u.s.trate how s.p.a.ces for transition might open in adaptation processes within a single governance regime: urban risk management. There are as many different models of urban risk management as there are examples (see, for example, UN-HABITAT, 2007), but some general observations can be made that are also ill.u.s.trative of the interaction of actors, structures and visions of development to be found in other types of regime and this is the aim here.

The starting point for a.s.sessing scope and barriers for transition in adaptation is to recognise the contested social construction of the vision, a.s.sociated priorities and subsequent practices that give substance to the regime, and also describe those fault lines that are likely to come under pressure and may be realigned as transition unfolds. Competing visions of the city are underlain by ideological, material and economic interests (Kohler and Chaves, 2003). The balance of influence accorded to individual visions determines what urbanisation means, who the winners and losers are and under adaptation to climate change what aspects of urbanisation are to be protected or are dispensable for any one settlement. Indeed in different places across the city different visions and a.s.sociated actions will have more or less traction even within a single policy sector. This provides opportunities for alternative experiments that may come to dominance once governance s.p.a.ce is opened following a disaster event, political or economic change or macro-administrative decision such as decentralisation.

A range of visions that can provide narratives for the direction of dominant risk management decisions in a city are shown in Table 4.2. Different visions of urbanisation include the city as a motor for generating macro-economic wealth, Table 4.2 Linking visions of the city to pathways for managing vulnerability Vision of the city Vulnerable objects Pathways for managing vulnerability Literature An engine for economic growth Physical a.s.sets and economic infrastructure Insurance, business continuity planning Econometrics of business continuity and insurance An organism or integrated system linking consumption and production Critical/life-support infrastructure Mega-projects connecting urban and rural environmental systems Political-ecology, systems theory A source of livelihoods The urban poor, households, livelihood tools Extending and meeting ent.i.tlements to basic needs Livelihoods a.n.a.lysis and medical sociology A stock of acc.u.mulated a.s.sets Housing and critical/life-support infrastructure Safe construction and land-use planning Political-economy and urban sociology A political and cultural arena Political freedoms, cultural and intellectual vitality Inclusive politics and the protection of human rights Discourse a.n.a.lysis and public administration/political theory (Source: Pelling and Wisner, 2009) an organism turning raw materials into products and waste, a source of livelihoods for urban citizens, an historical acc.u.mulation of physical a.s.sets and infrastructure or a place for cultural and political exchange and debate.

Visions and a.s.sociated risk management preferences need not be mutually exclusive and more often visions provide only a rationale for prioritisation. As climate change and other development dynamics interact in the city existing narratives will be tested. With this comes the possibility of opening s.p.a.ce for renegotiating priorities within a single policy area and also more broadly so that resources and political will may be drawn into or away from risk management. The complexity of risk management means that there are many potential actors with a stake in the existing regime, and with an interest in any renegotiation of the balance of priorities in risk management that adapting to climate change may offer whether through replication, up-scaling or mainstreaming. Table 4.3 summarises the kinds of actors likely to have a direct stake in adapting urban risk management sector. The key message to take from this is the wide range of urban actors that can be engaged with through even a single sector, extending from applied emergency and risk management to development regulation and planning. This indicates both the number of opportunities that can exist for Table 4.3 Urban disaster risk reduction: multiple activities and stakeholders Professional community Development planning Development regulation Risk management Emergency management Core activities Land-use, transport, critical infrastructure Building codes, pollution control, traffic policing Vulnerability and risk a.s.sessment, building local resilience Early warning, emergency response and reconstruction planning Primary stakeholders Urban planners, city engineers, critical infrastructure planners, homeowners, private property managers, investors, transportation users, taxi drivers' a.s.sociations, other professional a.s.sociations, academia Environmental regulation, law enforcement, contractors, factory owners, drivers' and transporters' a.s.sociations Primary health care, sanitation and water supply, community development, local economic development, infrastructure management, waste haulers' a.s.sociation, water users' representatives Environmental monitoring, emergency services, civil defence, disaster management coordination, fire fighters, police, military, Red Cross/Crescent society (Source: Pelling and Wisner, 2009) inserting progressive practices such as inclusive decision-making or downward-accountability into policy reform in this single sector but also the challenge of overcoming inst.i.tutional lock-in and inertia that has often been found in sectors with multiple actors where existing inter-organisational alliances act to make the existing regime resilient.

Opportunities exist for innovation niches within private, public and civil sectors and through communities of practice that cross these boundaries. Through local branches or by advocacy at the landscape level international agencies and other governments may also be active in shaping niche or landscape led innovation. Where innovation is fostered and how it is evaluated and diffused throughout the regime in transition will also be a function of the balance of formal and informal or shadow systems in the city. Social networks and communities of practice that cross-cut formal organisational boundaries will influence scope for the development of novel adaptations, and the speed and direction of diffusion and reform. In urban contexts local government should play a pivotal role as a mediator and facilitator of development in addition to any direct regulatory and management roles. That the reality of local government is so often as an under-resourced actor, lacking in human capital, popular legitimacy and political influence is a great constraint. This is ill.u.s.trative of Jerneck and Olsson's (2008) observation that the regime level tends to be resistant to change and that innovation comes more often from local niches or the wider landscape and is accepted only when the regime is stressed.

Conclusion.

Opportunity for transition opens when adaptations, or efforts to build adaptive capacity, intervene in relations.h.i.+ps between individual political actors and the inst.i.tutional architecture that structures governance regimes. Transitional adaptation falls short of directly challenging dominant cultural and political regimes, but can set in place pathways for incremental, transformational change. Both actor-oriented regime theory and socio-technological transition theory provide ways forward for drawing out the connections between adaptation and social evolution short of regime change. They share an emphasis on the role of agency in the dialectical relations.h.i.+p between actors and inst.i.tutions that const.i.tute governance systems; agency that if fostered by a supportive governance regime can be a resource of alternative ideas and practices available for implementation following changes in the wider physical and economicpolitical environment.

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