India's Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) is the largest labour guarantee scheme in the world, offering 100 days of paid labour to every rural household. This article reviews the growing evidence base, assessing the extent to which the scheme can be said to contribute to resilience to climate change, based on its effectiveness as a safety net and driver of household accumulation, its ability to create assets which build collective resilience, and its support for transformations of exploitative social relations. The article concludes that the MGNREGA has already made a major contribution to resilience, but requires improvements in governance and state capacity to maximize its contribution.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Cambodia’s transition from socialist to market-oriented tenure became associated with severe tenure insecurity for those living in areas of self-built housing in the capital, Phnom Penh. This paper explores the legal geographies of this tenure insecurity by assessing how low-income urban dwellers interacted with a rapidly shifting legal system. Through analysis of historical legal documents, survey data and archived land disputes, it is found that market-oriented tenure reforms were exclusionary by design, and directly resulted in an ‘informal’ tenure system that legally rendered self-built dwellings in a constant state of provisionality. The findings provide a critique of orthodox accounts of tenure reform in post-socialist cities, which propose the deepening of market reforms to increase security. Instead, the paper builds on critical legal geographies of neoliberalism by suggesting that insecurity in Phnom Penh was perpetuated by laws, rather than their absence or the circumventing of laws. The analysis also contributes to understandings of informal tenure by presenting a post-socialist, state-constructed and exclusionary system of informality.

The residents of informal settlements face a diverse range of urban risks, from climate and economic shocks to local pollution and the threat of eviction. This article explores these risks by conducting Participatory Hazard Vulnerability and Capacity Assessments (PHVCA) in three informal settlements in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. The assessment uncovers a variety of risks, which interact with each other and local vulnerabilities to produce complex risk profiles for residents. In this way, we highlight the importance of a holistic assessment of urban risk rather than focusing on single risks or specific sectors. The participatory approach also reveals household and community-level processes through which risks are experienced, negotiated and in some cases addressed, providing valuable insights into the ways vulnerable urban populations can be best supported. Keywords disasters / informal settlements / participatory methods / resilience / Southeast Asia / urban risk / vulnerability I. IntrodUCtIon Urban risk is complex and multi-scaled, encompassing issues ranging from global changes in climate to local changes in land use. Sources of risk can be environmental, socioeconomic, physical and political, and are often regarded as external influences on a city and its inhabitants, (1) such as extreme climate events or commodity price fluctuations. However, they may also be internal, such as land use change that has the potential for negative, unintended consequences. (2) Making sense of the multiple risks facing those living in informal settlements is critical from a policy perspective if communities are to be supported to overcome them. To this end, community-centred studies have proved crucial to uncover local experiences of risk. Such studies have identified the complex ways that physical stressors, such as natural hazards and climate change, affect residents in informal settlements. (3) These studies show, for example, how floods or rising sea levels have local impacts through their synergy with local conditions, such as the extent and quality of drainage coverage and changes in the built environment, to benjamin Flower is a research consultant for People in need. He works on the "building disaster resilient Communities in Cambodia" project, which is funded by the european Civil Protection and Humanitarian operations (eCHo) disaster Preparedness Programme.

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