From the global down local and back: Scaled politics of urban risk reduction and adaptation

Abstract

The growing need to anticipate, prevent, and prepare for risks and disasters in cities has been centrally located in global policy frameworks of recent years and especially coastal cities in the Global South have been at the center of attention with regards to mounting urban risks. Policies, strategies, plans and measures in the light of adapting to climate change, enhancing resilience and reducing disaster risks in cities draw on certain visions, narratives and imaginaries of what disaster risks are and what a resilient city should look like. The underlying processes are embedded in local and global power relations and informed by different forms of knowledge. So far, little is known about the interplay of global and local disaster risk reduction regimes and about the rationales behind risk reduction and adaptation strategies, measures and actions at local level.

This presentation suggests that the human-geographical concepts of scale and politics of scale are useful lenses to assess how discourses and practices of urban risk reduction and adaptation are embedded in, shaped by and altering and contesting narratives and processes that circulate between different geographical scales. The concept helps to identify and explore how different scales are envisioned, produced, reproduced and altered between the global and the local in processes of risk reduction and adaptation.

While the presentation keeps a theoretical-conceptual focus, considerations and arguments are illustrated by drawing on a case study of flood risk governance in Mumbai, including several months of fieldwork between 2015 and 2022. It is discussed how the notion of scale can shed light into scaled politics in urban risk governance and adaptation regimes, and more specifically the problematization of flood risk and adaptation needs, the techniques developed and implemented to govern flood risks, the rationalities behind these and the identities evolving in these processes.