The politics of disaster vulnerability: Flooding, post-disaster interventions and water governance in Baltistan, Pakistan

Abstract

This paper uses governance of water infrastructure in two settlements of Baltistan as an entry point to examine the co-production of power and vulnerability. Access to water and irrigated land is a critical factor in determining how the effects of disasters, such as flooding, are socially distributed within a community. At the same time, the governance of water is intimately linked to the longer-term politics of disaster vulnerability. We examine three different forms of disputes over water infrastructure where struggles over authority and social ordering materialise: (i) between and within settlements over access to a water resource; (ii) within settlements over post-disaster water infrastructure development and (iii) between a settlement and the district government over land, water rights and flood protection. The findings illustrate that the governance of water infrastructure involves continuous negotiations, contestations and disputes over access rights. Access to water resources as an expression of rights plays a key role in the recognition of authority relations. In particular, influential individuals seek to legitimise their leadership role in a settlement by representing the rights and interests of groups in the negotiation of these disputes. However, environmental variability and change, including disasters and post-disaster development interventions, alter perceptions of what constitute legitimate rights, and provide spaces for popular contestation of authority relations through silent non-compliance with decisions. The close interlinkages between material and non-material effects of a disaster are a key feature of the co-production of power and vulnerability. By adding authority relations to studies of village-level practices around disasters, we enrich our understanding of the co-production of power and vulnerability and how these dynamics unfold over time. It is only by investigating this co-production that a deeper understanding can be developed of the mechanisms through which vulnerability is either exacerbated or reduced for particular groups.

Insights intended to improve adaptation planning and reduce vulnerability at the local scale

“…The social constructivism school of thought has influenced contemporary climate-change vulnerability assessments. The rationale of this research tradition is that social stressors (internal conditions) (e.g., vested interests, institutional factors, governance structures, unequal access to property and resources, corruption and nepotism, elite interests, marginalization, power relations, and other socio-economic and political factors) also determine the state of a system of analysis (Turner et al, 2003;Ford and Smit, 2004;Wisner et al, 2003;Füssel, 2005Füssel, , 2007Schröter et al, 2005;Füssel and Klein, 2006;Tonmoy et al, 2014;Pearse, 2016;Arifeen and Eriksen, 2019;Barnett, 2020;Mikulewicz, 2020;Scoville-Simonds et al, 2020;Eriksen et al, 2021). This interpretation of vulnerability incorporates human dimensions and food-security studies have widely used it to explain the implications of both physical and socioeconomic circumstances in unfolding famines (Wisner, 1976;Sen, 1981;Watts and Bohle, 1993;Downing, 2003;Füssel, 2005).…”

Interdisciplinary research in hazards and disaster risk

“…However, in other contexts, the issuance of a warning can be tied into particular evacuation decisions or other civil defence measures – effectively meaning that the production of an alert is a policy decision made by scientists; and this is something many scientists are not comfortable with (Donovan 2019; Papale 2017). Indeed, there have been substantial debates in volcanology, for example, about the role of scientists in crises (Bretton, Gottsmann and Christie 2018; Giordano et al 2016; Papale 2017). Advisors hold an unambiguously social and political role because knowledge travels and people question it: critical geographers and sociologists of science have demonstrated that a linear model of science in the public sphere does not work in practice (Beck 2011; Donovan and Oppenheimer 2014).…”

“…Reducing social vulnerability and enhancing both social and environmental justice go together (Cutter 2012;Ryder 2017;Shrestha et al 2019;Sotolongo, Kuhl and Baker 2021): they involve challenging the political and development decisions that lead to inequalities of risk (Arifeen and Eriksen 2020;Fraser et al 2020). The complex drivers of risk are rooted and perpetuated through poor development practices, through exposure to hazard events and ongoing poor risk governance.…”

Affective adaptation = effective transformation? Shifting the politics of climate change adaptation and transformation from the status quo

“…Most often, a broadly historical materialist approach is used in the literature, which understands interconnections between political economies and livelihoods, probing how actions in one place effect other places (Carr, 2008; Taylor, 2014). Relations of gender, class, ethnicity, and labor, as well as broader capitalist relations, embed vulnerability in the political economic history of a place and adaptation approaches (Arifeen & Eriksen, 2020; Mikulewicz, 2021). Building resilience or supporting a change in the political economy of one place, for a certain group of people, can increase vulnerabilities for other people in another place (Taylor, 2014; Tschakert & Tuana, 2013), known as maladaptation (Magnan et al, 2016).…”