Building transformative capacity for adaptation planning and implementation that works for the urban poor: Insights from South Africa

Gina Ziervogel

doi:10.1007/s13280-018-1141-9

Gina Ziervogel

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-018-1141-9

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Abstract

The intersecting challenges of urbanization, growing inequality, climate and environmental risk and economic sustainability require new modes of urban governance. Although the urban poor are increasingly recognized as needing to be part of climate adaptation planning and implementation, many governance arrangements fail to explicitly include them. In order to make climate governance more inclusive, transformative capacity is needed. Drawing on two case studies from different urban contexts in South Africa, this paper explores the nature of inclusive governance between local government and the urban poor and the extent to which this has contributed to transformative development trajectories. The findings suggest that inclusive governance will be strengthened when local government (1) recognizes the everyday reality of the urban poor and works with them to identify priorities for transformative change, (2) supports sustained intermediaries who are urban poor themselves and (3) draws on diverse modes of governance to find new ways to engage diverse actors and experiment with inclusive adaptation planning and practice. These practices will help to build transformative capacity that can envisage and enable new ways of governing urban risk and implementing adaptation that puts the poor, frequently most impacted by climate and disaster risk, at the centre.

Highlights

Multi-lateral agreements such as the Urban SDG, New Urban Agenda, Paris agreement and others are increasingly seeing cities as well placed to contribute to achieving ambitious targets (Revi et al 2014; Parnell 2016; Solecki et al 2018)
Lessons should be learned from this and other fields, including disaster risk reduction, to explore how local governments might engage directly with citizens to unpack and collaborate around adapting to climate variability (Wamsler 2016), with the urban poor (Archer et al 2014; Chu et al 2016; Fraser 2017). Contributing to this gap, the aim of this paper is to explore how transformative capacity for urban climate adaptation can be built through a shift to inclusive governance between local government and the urban poor
We have been promised for a long time, and we did not want only promises - so it was a rocky kind of relationship but it made a difference to where we are

Summary

Introduction

Multi-lateral agreements such as the Urban SDG, New Urban Agenda, Paris agreement and others are increasingly seeing cities as well placed to contribute to achieving ambitious targets (Revi et al 2014; Parnell 2016; Solecki et al 2018). The persistent failure of cities to adequately address equity and social inclusion has prompted calls for inclusive urbanization, seeing local governments as catalysts or principal agents in social transformation, in the context of climate change (Shrestha et al 2014; McGranahan et al 2016; Amundsen et al 2018; Solecki et al 2018). In order to shift current trajectories more rapidly towards the possibility of meeting the SDGs and associated goals and targets, the call for urban transformation to systematically address environmental and climate risk alongside social change has been embraced (Revi et al 2014; Solecki et al 2018; Bai et al 2018). Drawing on social ecological systems and political ecology literature, Solecki et al (2018, p. 38) define urban transformation, as ‘‘fundamental change in the system configuration... deemed necessary and implemented, putting the core of formerly

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