Climate resilience and informal settlements: the urgent need to focus on how power and knowledge interact
IIED calls for urgent attention to the political nature of climate adaptation in cities. While technical innovation has a role to play, it cannot overcome the way in which power dynamics produce vulnerability and risk. IIED emphasises the urgent need to redress power differentials between city actors as a primary objective to ensure that urban development planning and resilience investments integrate the knowledge and priorities of marginalised and vulnerable communities.
An aerial view of Sao Paulo, illustrating the multiple ways in which cities urbanise and produce risk (Photo: Eric Bergeri)
Climate risk is expected to continue to grow and concentrate in cities with low adaptive capacity, and particularly in informal settlements, which tend to be highly exposed and vulnerable to climate disasters.
Low- and middle-income countries are experiencing the highest and fastest urban growth in the world. This development pathway threatens to produce significant climate risks, exposing many vulnerable urban dwellers, but it also offers an opportunity for transformation.
By addressing socio-economic drivers of urbanisation and marginalisation, the production of this risk can be prevented.
However, the rapid pace of urbanisation in low- and middle-income regions demands urgent policy and programmatic action before this window of opportunity closes.
The challenge
In the coming decades, the growth of global climate risk will be driven by cities in low- and middle-income countries. Crucially, the ways in which urban development and planning processes integrate the risk knowledge and resilience priorities of vulnerable groups will determine whether these cities follow development pathways to resilience or increased vulnerability.
Currently, the knowledge and risk experience of marginalised and vulnerable groups, such as those living in informal settlements, is systematically ignored. This structural marginalisation produces risk in cities and among the most vulnerable groups.
Cities host half of the world’s population, and by 2050 this figure is projected to increase to more than two thirds of the world’s population.
In the period between 2015 and 2020, about 90% of all urban growth took place in less-developed regions, where informal settlements has been the dominant form of urbanisation. The most pronounced growth of urban vulnerability and climate exposure has taken place in informal settlements of low- and middle-income countries (PDF), in small and medium-sized cities.
The fundamental role of cities and city actors in responding to climate change has been recognised in both policy and practice. However, cities are complex in nature, and their development and adaptation pathways are shaped by a wide range of actors with diverging visions of the future and conflicting interests.
In other words, the politics of adaptation and risk often prevent top-down and linear interventions from contributing to inclusive urban resilience.
Interventions at multiple levels, that facilitate dialogue and knowledge co-production through multi-stakeholder governance arrangements, have been widely endorsed as an effective approach to deal with complexity, inclusive development and, ultimately, urban resilience.
However, knowledge co-production methodologies are generally deployed without a contextual understanding of the power and politics that shape cities’ development and adaptation pathways, limiting their effectiveness.
Responses for transformation
Cities can substantially increase their climate resilience by democratising whose risk counts when it comes to development planning and decision making.
This requires a fundamental shift from expert-led decision-making processes to include the knowledge of vulnerable communities, many of whom live in informal settlements.
Learning how to balance uneven power relations in multi-stakeholder decision-making processes and planning is the crux of this challenge and will shape the resilience of the future.
To address this challenge policy and practice must focus on context-specific power and politics in deploying knowledge co-production interventions.
These interventions should facilitate dialogue and knowledge sharing between city actors, such as policymakers, civil society organisations, businesses, researchers and knowledge brokers. They may also produce new evidence to inform decision making, as well as consensus for collective action and agreed policy agendas among city actors.
Ultimately, the ambition of co-production initiatives is to reshape the way in which the knowledge of different city actors influences decision making, such as urban development planning or investment in resilience.
When deployed tactically, knowledge co-production methodologies can:
- Redress power relations that systematically exclude the knowledge of marginalised groups; and
- Transform the drivers of urbanisation and marginalisation that produce and accumulate risk in cities and informal settlements.
Policymakers and practitioners should have an intimate understanding of contextually specific power and politics. This means teasing out local configurations of actors and networks, and interacting across and through the institutional, cultural and biophysical contexts of informal settlements and the city as a whole.
For instance, large infrastructure investments in cities tend to be driven by national development agencies, with little or no accountability to local constituencies. Relying on international consultancy firms to produce the risk assessments that inform the design of these projects means that the knowledge of vulnerable communities is systematically ignored.
An understanding of the conflicts that limit municipal cooperation and fragment civil society can guide co-production interventions to broker agreements, produce local risk knowledge, align resilience priorities and exploit existing accountability mechanisms.
Mobilising knowledge for impact
IIED has a long history of partnership with community-based and grassroots organisations focused on co-producing knowledge to bring about solutions for urban poverty and sustainable urban development.
For example, our decades-long partnership with Slum Dwellers International on initiatives such as Know Your City has provided solid experience of knowledge co-production.
More recently, IIED has worked with the Adaption Research Alliance and more than 125 organisations across the world to develop the 'Strengthening and Enhancing Contextual Urban Resilience (SECURe) framework', an innovative, systematic and structured approach to co-producing resilience solutions.
The organisations involved were identified through a structured mapping exercise that looked for experience in climate justice working on research programmes or policymaking.
This framework provides organisations leading urban resilience interventions with a ‘roadmap’ to conduct co-production interventions. The approach helps organisations to strategically address the power relations that structure urban development and adaptation pathways in cities, and the way that the knowledge of vulnerable groups is excluded from collective decision making.
For this, the SECURe framework deploys a power-focused context analysis to tactically orient the design of co-production interventions, maximising their chances for impact:
- A context analysis framework helps understand how institutional, cultural and biophysical contexts articulate and produce dominant networks of influence in cities, and their ability to drive urbanisation, risk accumulation and vulnerability in informal settlements.
Crucially, this means understanding how resilience and development visions, incentives structures and regulation privilege the exchange of knowledge, information and resources between certain actors and institutions, while excluding others.
This also means understanding how social norms and intersectional identities, such as gender, ethnicity, age, caste and class, shape who has authority, credibility and access to and control of resources.
Finally, this means understanding how the built environment - such as transport infrastructure - and climate extremes and stresses enable and disrupt knowledge and resource exchange between different networks and social groups; and the windows of opportunity for institutional transformation and learning they open.
- An intervention framework, which guides organisations leading co-production interventions on how to tactically engage networks of influence in cities, with the intention to transform urbanisation and adaptation pathways and produce more inclusive, resilience futures.
The framework provides a suite of methodological guidelines that help to increase the collaboration potential of different networks and their capacity to influence decision making and planning. These guidelines range from behaviour change and technical interventions, to empowerment and brokering timely agreements, to system restructuring.
They use methods that approach the problem of realigning networks of influence through knowledge production and evidence, experiential learning, and through dialogue platforms.
This intervention framework offers a systematic way of thinking through which methodological approaches are needed to transform the way institutional, cultural and biophysical contexts of cities privilege the collaboration and exchange of certain networks and thus their influence over collective decision making.
Action agenda
- Researchers and practitioners contributing to urban resilience should approach knowledge co-production interventions with a context-specific understanding of how power relations drive urban development and risk.
Interventions that use co-production methods without considering the complexity surrounding the politics of risk and adaptation will have limited impact at best, and exacerbate processes of exclusion and marginalisation at worst.
- Researchers and practitioners should adopt a common framework to inform and design co-production interventions, such as the SECURe framework. Adopting a framework to understand power relations and the transformative potential of their interventions will help accelerate learning and achieve results at scale.
- Donors should fund a knowledge hub to bring together lessons from researchers and practitioners working in different cities.
To guide future interventions, it is crucial to have comparable understandings of how city-specific articulations of power shape the potential for impact of co-production methodologies. This will increase the effectiveness of resilience investments and make use of the window of opportunity where cities of low- and middle-income countries are rapidly urbanising.
Author
Alejandro Barcena is a researcher in IIED's urban resilience team. He has an extensive experience in transdisciplinary work, facilitating conversations across social and physical science research, policy and practice.
