Abstract
The increasing and disproportionate impacts associated with disaster risk and climate change risk in cities and the urgency for action have sparked academic and policy debates about transformation in the context of urban disaster risk management and climate change adaptation. Yet, the vague, ambiguous and diverse understandings of the concept of transformation, combined with a lack of empirical grounding, deter the possibilities of its application in policy and practice, including a constructive engagement with municipal governments in leveraging fundamental change. Building upon the amalgamation of insights from sociological institutionalism, policy process research and complexity theories in organisation studies, the paper proposes an institutionalisation framework as a heuristic device to make sense of transformation. The framework unpacks types, mechanisms and agents of change across three phases – emergence, embeddedness and sustained change – and is applied to analyse the experience of the municipal government of Santa Fe, Argentina, with disaster risk management over a decade. The findings confirm the two productive tensions that traction transformation, namely, change/stability and leadership/networked spaces, and that the loci of fundamental change are distributed across time, space and agentic actors. The framework and case study jointly illustrate intervention points for municipal governments to catalyse transformative change when advancing urban disaster risk management.
Highlights
Critical scholars in disaster and disaster risk studies have challenged misleading framings of disasters as natural and extraordinary since the 1970s, focusing on the root causes and underlying drivers that unveil the historical, social and political processes that produce and reproduce the conditions of disaster risk (O’Keefe et al, 1976; Blaikie et al, 1994; Wisner et al, 2004)
This paper argues that thinking about fundamental change from within, as inner pathways of transformation, might serve as a more tangible and necessary starting point for transformative change
Building upon the contributions of other scholars, this paper argues that organisational theories, in general, and organisational institutionalism, in particular, provide fruitful insights to think through the attributes of transformation and connect them to the organisations that steer these processes and change alongside, and as a result of, them (Pelling et al, 2008; Gupta et al, 2010; Termeer et al, 2017)
Summary
Critical scholars in disaster and disaster risk studies have challenged misleading framings of disasters as natural and extraordinary since the 1970s, focusing on the root causes and underlying drivers that unveil the historical, social and political processes that produce and reproduce the conditions of disaster risk (O’Keefe et al, 1976; Blaikie et al, 1994; Wisner et al, 2004). The paper argues that a critical reading of transformation invites us to rethink the conditions under which the urban can delineate an enabling environment for disaster risk management (Wesely et al, 2021) and to better understanding the role that municipalities can play in leveraging this potential It proposes institutionalisation as a heuristic device to unpack the complexity of municipal governments in terms of types and mechanisms of change and the relations in which they engage in the course of urban disaster risk management processes. Revisited by the possibilities of the new institutionalism in sustainability and climate change research (Allen and You, 2002; Fazey et al, 2018), institutionalisation provides a novel framework for undertaking pathways of change type of analysis as well as for delineating practical trajectories to foreground transformation These are crucial conceptual and policy contributions to the ongoing debate on trans formation in the context of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation and towards the materialisation of real ‘urban’ utopias.
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