Transforming Political Capabilities for Equitable Resilience

Nepal and Thailand offer examples of the rapid urbanisation that is underway across the Global South. Urbanisation is dependent on systems of infrastructure that deliver core services, such as water, energy, and solid waste management. Infrastructure investment and governance decisions thus play a central role in urban inequality, distributing access to services and associated opportunities for human flourishing. As in many places, in Nepal and Thailand significant hope is invested in urbanisation, with growth in urban growth central to a vision of increased economic opportunity and a rebalancing of the economy beyond the capital cities. Yet despite accelerating rates of urbanisation, policy remains limited. The majority of secondary cities have continued to expand in area, with population growth frequently dominated by individuals and households moving into informal settlements where they are marginalised from opportunities, basic services and decision making. Those in informal settlements are also particularly at risk from hazards such as earthquakes, flooding and landslides. The risks from these hazards are routinely understood to reside in particular locations, such as in zones identified to be vulnerable to flooding or in buildings susceptible to earthquake shocks. Yet in urban areas, infrastructure, institutions and political relations create a complex web of connections across scales. It is through disruptions and failures in these underpinning urban systems that hazards are made manifest and the impacts distributed - for example when a landslide in one location disrupts access to clean water in a downstream community.

Today, resilience dominates contemporary urban disaster and climate policy initiatives and investments. While the popularity of resilience continues to increase, there are challenges. At a conceptual level, resilience overlooks the significance of power and social relations in determining who is made resilient to what risks. In practice, the focus of urban policy remains on investment to fill the 'infrastructure deficit', overlooking the way in which existing urban systems place different groups of people at risk. As a consequence, the application of resilience to policy and practice in urban settings frequently reproduces or deepens existing patterns of risk, inequality and marginality.

In this project, our vision is that urban communities are able to secure their interests in resilience planning and investments, enabling access to services critical to wellbeing in a manner that recognises and responds to the risk of failure in urban systems in the event of natural hazards. To do this we bring together scholars and practitioners in different disciplines from the UK, Nepal and Thailand. We will develop new tools and apply them in Nepal and Thailand to reveal two critical urban phenomena. First, how narratives of risk and resilience can sustain inequality in access to services. And second, how the complexity of urban systems creates risk of failures in service provision with uneven impacts on residents. Our tools will enable those working with marginal communities to identify strategic alliances and entry-points for engagement, opening spaces for dialogue in the city that generate new knowledge and narratives, securing decision making power for marginalised groups and anchoring resilience in the complexity of urban risk creation.

Urban poor
The immediate beneficiaries are poor urban communities in Nepal and Thailand in our target cities, alongside our partners and the stakeholders who provide additional support to these groups. Our direct impact will be in two forms. First, we build increased capacity for the actors we work with, in the form of expanded skills, relationships (including with influential stakeholders at higher scales) and co-produced knowledge. Second, we expect through this to achieve a change in material circumstances and standing in relation to formal authority, such that these communities have increased leverage in resilience planning. Longer term beneficiaries are the urban poor who will be targeted by future resilience policy and programmes. By providing conceptual frameworks and methods we will support international development partners to design and deliver programmes that meet the needs of urban people in Nepal, Thailand and across the Global South. We will deliver these tools through our networks and at a final workshop in each country, in the form of guides to participatory context analysis and systemic risk assessment, to aid those working with marginalised communities in applying the research findings. Together, these outputs will contribute towards a rethinking among actors working with urban communities of the nature of urban vulnerability and the processes required for resilience planning.

Municipality and other stakeholders in target cities; national and federal level decision makers
We will have direct impact with city level stakeholders, enabling shared learning and leading to new understandings of urban risk and new understandings of the role of marginalised communities and their interests. It will also support the development of new relationships (with stakeholders at the community and city level) and skills, new capacity to appreciate and analyse risk through an urban systems approach, and insight into mechanisms through which planning can support more equitable human development. Influence at the national and provincial levels will support indirect impact on urban poor more widely in each country. We will work with SEI Asia, who have a track record of translating research into policy influence, to support the production of policy and practice briefings for national and municipal stakeholders. These will set out the main findings of the project in relation to equitable development and disaster risk planning, and the significance (and practical application) of urban systems thinking.

Regional and global decision makers
Regional decision makers will be reached as above, with the potential to impact the wellbeing of the urban poor across south Asia. In addition, the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) Asia Bangkok office hosts the International Centre of Excellence on Transforming Development and Disaster Risk (ICoE-TDDR), of which PI Ensor is a founding member. SEI Asia and the ICoE-TDDR provides uptake pathways in national-level decision-making, as well as at key regional and global level processes such as within IRDR, the UNISDR Science and Technology Advisory Group (STAG), the Asian Ministerial Conference on DRR, the Association for South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) Committee on Disaster Management, the Regional Consultative Committee on Disaster Management, and the World Urban Forum.