Unpacking principles of resilience mainstreamed in Ethiopia's local urban spatial planning documents: practices from Kombolcha, an urbanizing secondary city

Abstract

Adopting and enforcing redundancy, diversity, robustness, and integration principles are required to create spatially resilient cities. However, no studies have demonstrated their significance and application to local urban spatial planning legal frameworks (policy documents) and plans. Therefore, this study aims to fill this gap through an ex-ante review of six Ethiopian spatial planning policy documents: the Urban Development Policy (UDP), the Urban Planning Proclamation (UPP), the Structure Plan Manual (SPM), the Urban Plan Preparation and Implementation Strategy (UPPIS), and the first and second Growth and Transformation Plans (GTP I and II). Besides, the paper undertook post-ante evaluations of the 2001 Development Plan (DP), 2011 Structure Plan (SP), and the 2020 existing land use (ELU) of Kombolcha, a secondary city located in the South Wollo Zone of Amhara National Regional State, Ethiopia. Site observations supplemented the desk-based policy evaluation, Google Earth images, and data gathered from twenty-three purposefully selected key informants. NVivo 12 plus software aided the content analysis, where codes and categories were created based on the characteristics, and respective scores/coefficients were recorded. The findings revealed inconsistencies in the principles' mainstreaming with integration was well assimilated into the policy documents, receiving a score of 67.22, followed by redundancy, a value of 54.21. The tally for diversity and robustness were 44.84 and 31.83, respectively. Concerning policy-specific review, GTP I and II received the highest values of 54.28 and 57.74, respectively. However, UPPIS got the lowest with 18.50. Despite the plans' optimistic visions of addressing hazards and population growth-induced development pressures, their practical implementation had been hampered by the dominance of residential and manufacturing land-uses, haphazard block arrangements, and the municipality's limited ability to implement the proposals. The study, hence, necessitated capacity-building activities to improve local governments' spatial plan implementation capacities. The active participation of stakeholders and institutional collaboration also need further attention from all tiers of government.