Urban Disaster Resilience: Capacity Building for whom?

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Urban Disaster Resilience Capacity Building for
whom? Janki Andharia, PhD
Professor, Jamsetji Tata Centre for Disaster
Management Tata Institute of Social Sciences,
Mumbai
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Structure

• Resilience Old wine in new bottle?
• Strength of the concept
• A word of caution, the critique
• Capacity building
• Approach to community resilience building

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Old wine in a new bottle?

• Why the new term?
• What is the problem with vulnerability?
• What does it add to the discourse?
• Does it change situation on the ground for
  communities?
• Explosion of literature in the last 2 years

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Resilience

• Related to DRR and recovery, emphasis on
  capacity.
• Social resilience is associated with adaptation
  of individuals and society to environmental
  change and with enhancing coping ability of a
  community which strengthens it.
• Implies enhancing peoples rights and addressing
  socio-economic, gender and environmental
  inequalities that exacerbate vulnerability

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Recent definitions
the ability of individuals, communities and
states and their institutions to absorb and
recover from shocks, whilst positively adapting
and transforming their structures and means for
living in the face of long-term changes and
uncertainty (OECD 2013).  
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Metaphor, outcome and process
Resilience is a metaphor, need to unpackage at
community level both an outcome and a process
Practices focused on outcome have tended to adopt
top-down reactive approaches which can favour the
status quo and take attention away from
inequalities As a process, building disaster
resilience involves supporting the capacity of
individuals, communities and states to adapt
through assets and resources relevant to their
context.
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Strength of the concept 1/2

• Social Resilience compels external intervention
  agencies to bring the focus back to communities,
  their agency, their capacities and local
  institutions of democratic governance.
• The inherent strengths of people, households and
  communities based on cultural contexts and
  diversity of conditions and ways of living are
  recognized when exploring the idea of resilience.
  
• Resilience building therefore aligns itself to
  rights based approaches and emphasizes the need
  to "bounce forward" rather than merely "bounce
  back".

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Strength of the concept 2/2

• Makes linkages with social and environmental
  justice. It is not just giving - but
  strengthening coping capacities and adaptation
  strategies
• Requires careful, exploration and study of a
  community, especially since the objective is to
  address vulnerabilities and also to leverage
  their inherent strengths. Recognizes the
  interconnectedness with livelihoods,
  vulnerability and ways of living.
• Creates space for inclusion of traditional
  knowledge and past adaptation strategies that
  communities deployed successfully

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CRITIQUE 1/3

• Could become an emotive rhetoric, with of no
  analytical and strategic help when resilience is
  low (Coaffee and Rogers, 2008)
• Could inadvertently place upon the community,
  already experiencing poverty, deprivation and
  marginalization, the onus of absorbing impacts of
  decisions and actions of others over which the
  community has little control (Andharia Lakhani,
  2010).
• Glorifying resilience of a society which
  struggles for survival and has limited choices

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CRITIQUE 2/2

• Normalising poverty, the broader context which
  creates or sustains vulnerabilities and disasters
  in the first instance.
• Davidson (2010) argues that statements about
  human resilience should be critically examined,
  with regard to how knowledge is produced
  (epistemology and methodology) and to what the
  knowledge says (science and theory). Could
  reproduce pre-existing vulnerabilities, and
  marginalising processes.
• Pelling and Manuel-Navarrete (2011) have
  therefore argued for a definition of resilience
  that is transformative in nature instead of only
  reconstituting the status quo ex ante.

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Approaches or actions to facilitate long term
community resilience building 1/3

1. Develop a monitoring tool to assess community
   resilience to help identify areas where
   programmatic support is required. Community
   Resilience Index with indicators and benchmarks
   would help policy makers identify vulnerable
   areas, enable comparison and intervene
   pro-actively to enhance resilience. The Index
   would provide a simple method of predicting if a
   community will reach and maintain an acceptable
   level of functioning after a disaster and provide
   guidance to programming resilience
2. Strengthen local level capacities especially
   adaptive capacities with adequate skilled human
   resources, institutional support as well as with
   support from multi-stakeholder networks for risk
   reduction at the local level. Contextualizing
   interventions to ensure meaningful participation
   especially of vulnerable and at risk communities.
   Adopting inclusive approaches that help address
   inequalities power imbalance within
   communities across class, caste, gender ethnicity
   .

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Approaches or actions 2/3
3. Develop a National Policy and guidelines to
mainstream DRR and CCA in social protection
programmes to build resilience, creating an
enabling environment connecting different levels
and scales of intervention. Adopting
multi-stakeholder approach to risk governance is
important. 4.Invest in context-specific
sustainable solutions/ technologies to foster
resilience especially among the vulnerable or at
risk populations- bringing together traditional
knowledge and technological advancements for
economical and locally appropriate solutions for
the design and implementation of mitigation
measures.
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Approaches or Actions 3/3
5. Develop a National Framework to guide recovery
from disasters including the small scale
recurring disasters. This should include
flexible funding mechanisms to support the
financing of long term community resilience.
Supporting equitable access to resources,
measures to reduce risk and vulnerability and
promoting long term resilience to shocks and
stresses are important actions on part of the
government. Advocacy in these areas would also
help.
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THANK YOU
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