Academic and policy literatures on urban climate resilience tend to emphasize ‘good planning’ as the primary means for addressing the growing risk of flooding in Asia's coastal megacities. Cities have come to rely on disaster and climate resilience plans to future‐proof their landscapes and protect vulnerable populations. Yet while data is collected, models are built and plans are drafted, environmentally destructive development practices continue unabated and often unchallenged. This article examines and seeks to explain the contradictions between a growing awareness of the risks of climate‐induced flooding in resilience plans and the continuation of development practices widely acknowledged to exacerbate those risks. It analyzes these contradictions in the context of Mumbai and Kolkata, India's largest coastal cities, which are facing the severest threats from climate‐induced flooding. Based on analyses of key resilience planning documents and both planned and unplanned developments in some of Mumbai's and Kolkata's most ecologically sensitive areas, our analysis reveals that resilience planning, promoted by the central government and international consultants, and presented in locally produced ‘fantasy plans’, fails to address the risks of climate‐change‐related flooding owing to tendencies to sidestep questions of politics, power and the distributional conflicts that shape urban development. We conclude that efforts to reduce urban flood risk would benefit from the research, methods and analytic concepts used to critically study cities, but significant gaps remain between these fields.
ABSTRACT. Indigineity has emerged as an important area of focus for research and policy making on disaster risk reduction (DRR) and resilience. Most research on indigeneity and DRR centers on indigenous knowledge and its integration with western scientific understandings of hazards and risk. Through a detailed case study of the 2009 tsunami in American Samoa, we argue that indigenous institutions also play a critical role in disaster risk reduction and resilience. Based on original data from semistructured interviews, village planning meetings, and focus group discussions, we describe how the indigenous institutions of fa'a Samoa, or the culture of Samoa, operated in a time of crisis by: (1) structuring emergency decision making and authority; (2) assigning roles and responsibilities during crises; (3) building effective lines of communication between villages and outside actors; (4) providing a system of accountability for vulnerable people; and (5) acting as gatekeepers to villages and mobilizing social groups to act. We then suggest some ways that indigenous institutions could be better leveraged to help create more resilient communities.
Recovery is an important but understudied phase in the disaster management cycle. Researchers have identified numerous socio-demographic factors that help explain differences in recovery among households, but are less clear on the importance of place, which we define as a household's locality and local governance. In this paper, we examine the influence of place on disaster recovery through a study of the 2013 Colorado floods. Our findings are based on data collected from interviews, observation of recovery meetings, and a survey of 96 flood-affected households. We show that place shapes a household's disaster recovery by structuring: (1) physical exposure to hazards; (2) which local government has jurisdiction over recovery decisions; (3) local planning culture and its approach to citizen participation; and (4) the strength of social capital networks. Our findings expand the recovery literature and show that place-level variables should be taken into consideration when conceptualizing household recovery and resilience.
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