Stakeholders’ power in the networking structuration processes of the urban resilience concept in Habitat III agenda (2012-2016)

Abstract

The urban resilience concept was introduced in 2016 as a key concept in the Habitat III New Urban Agenda for the next 20 years. We wonder how this urban resilience concept was elaborated and who influenced it the most? The preparatory events structured several stakeholders’ networks. The relations between stakeholders allowed the flow of ideas in the consultation and production process. Some influential stakeholders strongly oriented definition of urban resilience concepts by taking power in the networking process of the consecutive meetings. The paper analyzes the network of stakeholders/concepts, during the building process between 2012 and 2016 (5,539 discourses from 290 stakeholders, in 357 events). The application of textual mining and machine learning topic modelling algorithm exposed the structure of the principal topics for building the concept of urban resilience, and presented how relations of main stakeholders with funders was crucial for the investment in policy interventions. Therefore, we underlined for the first time in an empirical way, different kinds of actors’ power in the construction process that supported the Habitat III resilience concept. We demonstrated how far some official stakeholders, but also external and private ones, oriented the construction of ideologies to validate the knowledge that supported the related actions in laboratory cities.