Making capacity building critical: Power and justice in building urban climate resilience in Indonesia and Thailand

Abstract

A growing number of programmes and initiatives around the world are attempting to strengthen the capacities of civil society and local governments to build urban climate resilience. However, these often treat issues of power and justice in relatively unproblematic ways, without considering whether their activities will entrench existing relationships or whether they have the potential to achieve more transformative change. This paper examines the capacity strengthening initiatives undertaken in two cities within the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN) – Bandar Lampung (Indonesia) and Hat Yai (Thailand) – to assess how ideas of power and justice have been incorporated. It examines the ways in which these activities are perceived to generate particular benefits, but also explores how the process and content were defined, and the ways in which different stakeholders participated in them. By doing so, it assesses both the procedural elements of capacity building (who is involved, how they are selected) and the distributional elements (how the outcomes of capacity building programmes affect different groups). These elements of justice can be both implicit and explicit, but need to be engaged with more critically if the processes and outcomes are to contribute to more transformative patterns of urban resilience.