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Risk and Resilience Management in Co-production
Abstract
This chapter focuses upon the potential of co-production in research linked to risk and resilience. Specifically, it proposes the need to see resilience practice as co-production and illustrates the argument with reflections from the Waterproofing Data project, which investigated water-related risks, with a focus on social and cultural aspects of data practices. The chapter describes how the project adopted a dialogic approach and developed innovative methods around data practices into a method that reframed citizen sensing as a critical pedagogical process. Here the engagement of residents of urban poor neighbourhoods in Brazil was central for a process of research co-production together with a multidisciplinary research team and stakeholders of local governmental and non-governmental organisations involved in disaster risk reduction. Ultimately, we argue that co-production is a necessary ingredient in research looking to transform governance and decision-making in how we respond, in a flexible way, to risks and crisis.
The UK ‘Sustainable Flood Memories’ project (2011–2014) and publications were shared with Brazilian researchers from the ‘Waterproofing Data’ project (2019–2022) to develop a transnational methodology for eliciting flood memories from local communities located in flood-prone areas. What has been striking about the collaboration is the similarities in terms of emotions, knowledge, tradition around flood experiences, and adaptation despite radically different socio-cultural and economic contexts alongside the significant differences in terms of relationships/dependence upon the state, water governance systems, and approaches to sustainability. This article draws upon the creative work we did in generating Brazilian memories of flood events (drawing upon the methodology of the Museu da Pessoa ) in the cities of São Paulo and Rio Branco, two very different locations, and compares these to the sustainable flood memory research in the UK. We explore what a transnational and multi-directional approach to the past and present narratives of remembering and forgetting of floods in variable contexts has to offer. Our findings bring lessons for how the arts and humanities can be brought to bear upon flood risk management in variable contexts of water governance by showing how trans-memorialization, commemorative, and storytelling methods can provide solidarity across national containers of water politics and management.
Purpose
This study examines co-production during the Covid-19 crisis, characterized as a Black Swan event, with a specific emphasis on local professionals’ preparedness and response.
Design/methodology/approach
A qualitative approach combining deductive and inductive approaches was employed to gather data from professional coordinators of co-production processes in Israeli local governments. The study utilizes professionalism theory as a framework to examine such key elements as professional knowledge, autonomy, status and legitimacy. Additionally, open coding is used to investigate emerging themes.
Findings
The findings reveal that, despite preventive efforts by the central government, local professionals were unprepared to address the crisis. Traditional top-down approaches failed during the crisis, emphasizing the need for peer learning and collaboration among various stakeholders. Professionals' de facto autonomy, driven by quick decision-making and creative problem-solving, elevated their legitimacy and status. Inter- and intra-organizational collaboration was essential to maintain performance through co-producing public services. Finally, multicultural awareness proved vital; neglecting this may have severe consequences in routine times but especially during crises.
Research limitations/implications
Using qualitative research, this study emphasizes the importance of understanding context in interpreting thoughts and actions. However, our approach has limitations. We collected data at a single point in time, which may not capture changes over time. Additionally, we relied on self-reporting from 19 public professionals in local municipalities, each managing the coproduction-based center within the respective municipality. However, this setup, where a single coordinator represents the entire co-production function of the municipality, has its limitations as only one voice is heard.
Practical implications
By shedding light on the multifaceted aspects of co-production, policymakers and professionals could learn about such substantial factors as professionals’ autonomy, inter-organizational collaborations and sensitivity to cultural nuances, which should be established first and foremost in routine times to prepare for crisis. In our case study, governmental preventive measures were inapplicable to crises, and experience of prior crises did not necessarily bestow an ability to prepare accordingly. This is where the role of the street-level professionals becomes significant: these are the actors who experience the crisis on the ground and may provide a quick and effective response. Their ability to take the reins, to be innovative and to generate knowledge while exerting their own professional consideration, proved extremely important.
Originality/value
This research contributes to our understanding of public service professionals’ effective leveraging of the contributions of co-producers in times of crisis. It shifts focus from top-down policy preparedness and implementation to the development of appropriate organizational structures and active and routine stakeholder engagement, thereby enhancing preparedness for crises.
Over recent years, and as a result of the recent global health pandemic, resilience has become increasingly central to contemporary policy discourses in urban planning and development in both the Global North and Global South. Drawing from ongoing empirical studies of community resilience and everyday practices that have been co-designed and co-produced alongside Brazilian marginalised communities which are highly vulnerable to a range of natural hazards, this paper highlights the growing importance of dialogical stakeholder engagement methodologies in designing alternative urban visions-so-called resilience imaginaries or counter-cities-across the Global South based on social diversity, equity and spatial justice. More specifically, the dialogical partici-patory mapping approach outlined in this paper utilises citizen science approaches to develop local resilience imaginaries, building on the pedagogical work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire and the conceptualisation of dialogue as a comprehensive and progressively unfolding methodological approach. Practically, we adopted a range of community engagement approaches that allowed local citizens to become more aware of their own risk context and embed this tacit knowledge into the operation of civil protection programmes. Our empirical results highlight the potential of such dialogical participatory approaches to capture lay knowledge from local citizens and contribute to the development of enhanced resilience approaches. The paper concludes by reflecting on the role of formerly marginalised voices in the advancement of local urban policy and on the novelty and promise of critical pedagogical approaches to co-production within existing regimes of urban governance and the imagining of radically independent counter-cities.
Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and have increasing impacts, which disproportionately affect marginalised and impoverished communities. This article proposes and assesses a new methodological approach for developing innovative solutions based on urban data analytics to address sustainability challenges in light of changing climate conditions. The approach draws inspiration from Paulo Freire's dialogic pedagogy and has been implemented in the international transdisciplinary project "Waterproofing Data", with multiple study sites in Brazil. The project has introduced three methodological interventions: making data practices visible, engaging citizens and communities with data, and sharing data stories. Our study demonstrates that these methods have expanded the types of data used in flood risk management and have engaged a wider range of social groups in the generation, circulation, and utilization of data. We present a framework that provides guidance about the ways in which data innovations can contribute to transformative change, aiming to ensure that future development trajectories are just, inclusive, and equitable. The findings provide evidence that our approach not only helps fill existing data gaps and promote more equitable flood risk governance but also democratises decision-making in climate adaptation. Citizens were empowered to take proactive measures to improve resilience to disaster risks, thereby saving lives and safeguarding livelihoods.
Citizen generated data can play an important role in enhancing community resilience. However, the relationship between data and community resilience has only been partly addressed in existing resilience scholarship, predominantly from the perspective of data utilisation in response to unfolding crises. Yet, in this study we attempt to highlight a different pathway for data-enabled contributions to community resilience, focusing on the process of data generation and its capacity to constitute a transformative moment itself. By exploring the case of the marginalized flood-prone community of M'Boi Mirim in São Paulo, Brazil, we introduce the concept of dialogical participatory mapping, and we argue that the process of generating geospatial data can empower local communities and assist in nourishing a resilience spirit among community members.
Purpose: The study aims to identify the gaps and the potentialities of citizen-generated data in four axes of warning system: (1) risk knowledge, (2) flood forecasting and monitoring, (3) risk communication and (4) flood risk governance.
/Design/methodology/approach: Research inputs for this work were gathered during an international virtual dialogue that engaged 40 public servants, practitioners, academics and policymakers from Brazilian and British hazard and risk monitoring agencies during the Covid-19 pandemic.
/Findings: The common challenges identified were lack of local data, data integration systems, data visualisation tools and lack of communication between flood agencies.
/Originality/value: This work instigates an interdisciplinary cross-country collaboration and knowledge exchange, focused on tools, methods and policies used in the Brazil and the UK in an attempt to develop trans-disciplinary innovative ideas and initiatives for informing and enhancing flood risk governance.
Resilience narratives have gathered increased attention in city-regional planning over the last two decades, emphasizing holistic foresight, long-term strategic visioning, cross-sectoral integration and collaborative modes of planning. Combining such resilience narratives with the established idea of socio-spatial imaginaries, we introduce the novel concept of ‘resilience imaginaries’ and explore its application in the city-region of Thessaloniki, Greece. This paper illustrates that resilience imaginaries can be viewed as dynamic and politically contested visions for long-term city-regional development, collectively structured by civic stakeholders, institutionally expressed through city-regional governance transformations and materially manifested through city-regional planning interventions.
Municipal risk governance requires a communication-oriented approach that involves
citizens in order to foster risk resilience. This study argues that citizen participation
mechanisms enable citizens to co-create and co-produce risk governance. The paper
draws on the case of a German city, including 45 interviews with experts from the
municipality’s administration. The results indicate that citizens play a vital role in the
risk identification and risk management of institutional and social, collective risks by
providing time, information, and other resources. Specific citizen participation
mechanisms can even help to handle system risks by fostering acceptance and
loyalty.
This article adapts the ethnographic medium of the diary to develop a method for studying data and related data practices. The article focuses on the creation of one data diary, developed iteratively over three years in the context of a national centre for monitoring disasters and natural hazards in Brazil (Cemaden). We describe four points of focus involved in the creation of a data diary – spaces, interfaces, types and situations – before reflecting on the value of this method. We suggest data diaries (1) are able to capture the informal dimension of data-intensive organisations; (2) enable empirical analysis of the specific ways that data intervene in the unfolding of situations; and (3) as a document, data diaries can foster interdisciplinary and inter-expert dialogue by bridging different ways of knowing data.
This paper presents results from the application
of a methodological framework developed as part of
an ongoing research project focused on
understanding inequalities in the healthcare access
of slum residents of cities in four countries:
Bangladesh, Kenya, Pakistan and Nigeria. We
employ a systematic approach to produce, curate and
analyse volunteered geographic information (VGI)
on urban communities, based on a combination of
collaborative satellite-imagery digitization and
participatory mapping, which relies upon geospatial
open-source technologies and the collaborative
mapping platform OpenStreetMap. Our approach
builds upon and extends humanitarian mapping
practices, in order to address the twofold challenge
of achieving equitable community engagement whilst
generating spatial data that adheres quality
standards to produce rigorous and trusted evidence
for policy and decision making. Findings show that
our method generated promising results both in terms
of community engagement and the production of
high-quality data on communities to analyse urban
inequalities.
This chapter investigates an intrinsic ambivalence in the use of digital technologies by citizen science projects: the often-used “citizen sensor” metaphor can either mean a heightened capacity to perceive and articulate an alternative world view (and thus results in empowerment); or it can connote that the citizen’s capabilities are constrained to capture predefined environmental signals (and thus implies instrumentality). Drawing on Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed alongside some of his later works, a new perspective on citizen sensing is presented that goes beyond epistemological concerns to address the types of relationships established with citizens, that is, their modes of engagement. Instead of obfuscating asymmetries in the relationships between citizens and scientists, it is argued that a Freirean perspective entails considering asymmetries as a constitutive and productive tension within a dialogical process of knowledge co-production. This dialogical approach enables the development of new methods and ethical-methodological criteria for citizen-generated data projects that are effectively able to empower citizens to leverage their realities, world views, and epistemologies – particularly those of marginalized and disadvantaged people and of the “global South.”
There is much discussion regarding the Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) capacity to promote inclusive development. While some argue that they represent an opportunity for goal-led alignment of stakeholders and evidence-based decision-making, other voices express concerns as they perceive them as a techno-managerial framework that measures development according to quantitatively defined parameters and does not allow for local variation. We argue that the extent to which the positive or negative aspects of the SDGs prevail depends on the monitoring system’s ability to account for multiple and intersecting inequalities. The need for sub-nationally (urban) representative indicators poses an additional methodological challenge—especially in cities with intra-urban inequalities related to socio-spatial variations across neighbourhoods. This paper investigates the extent to which the SDG indicators’ representativeness could be affected by inequalities. It does so by proposing a conceptual framing for understanding the relation between inequalities and SDG monitoring, which is then applied to analyse the current methodological proposals for the indicator framework of the “urban SDG,” Goal 11. The outcome is a call for (1) a more explicit attention to intra-urban inequalities, (2) the development of a methodological approach to “recalibrate” the city-level indicators to account for the degree of intra-urban inequalities, and (3) an alignment between methodologies and data practices applied for monitoring SDG 11 and the extent of the underlying inequalities within the city. This would enable an informed decision regarding the trade-off in indicator representativeness between conventional data sources, such as censuses and household surveys, and emerging methods, such as participatory geospatial methods and citizen-generated data practices.
Urban Resilience has recently emerged as a systematic approach to urban sustainability. The malleable definition of resilience has rendered its operationalisation an intriguing task for contemporary cities trying to address their organisational problems and confront uncertainty in a holistic manner. In this article we investigate the implementation challenges emerging for Resilient Strategies by the inattention paid to urban geological risk. We conceptualise urban geological risk as the combination of urban geohazards, geological vulnerability and exposure of the built environment and focus on the case study of Thessaloniki, Greece, a city that joined the 100 Resilient Cities initiative in 2014 and published its “Resilience Strategy 2030” (RS) in 2017. After a review of the RS, historical records of natural hazard events and with evidence gathered through interviews with city officials, we emphasize on earthquakes and surface flooding as the most relevant geohazards for Thessaloniki to tackle in its journey towards urban resilience. First, we examine geological vulnerability to earthquakes in conjunction with exposure of the built environment, as an outcome of ageing building stock, high building densities and the urban configuration, in Acheiropoietos neighbourhood, within the historic centre of the city. Then, we explore geological risk to surface flooding in Perea, in Thermaikos Municipality, with a particular focus on flash floods, by demonstrating how limited consideration of local geomorphology as well as semi-regulated urban expansion and its limited connection with emergency planning increase exposure of the built environment to surface flooding. Finally, we come up with the major implementation challenges Thessaloniki’s RS faces with regard to urban geohazards.
Resilience has risen rapidly over the last decade to become one of the key terms in international policy and academic discussions associated with civil contingencies and crisis management. As government and institutions confront threats like environmental hazards, technological accidents, climate change, and terrorist attacks, they recognize that resilience can serve as a key policy response. However, with the rapid rise of resilience has come uncertainty as to how it should be built and how different practices and approaches should come together to operationalize it. This paper seeks to lay out a research agenda for resilience in the 21st century.
Following a number of prominent concepts in urban planning, like participatory planning or self-help housing, co-production has started to gain momentum in the global South context. While it is has been long discussed as a means of service provision, the term is more and more often used in the broader sense of urban governance and policy planning. This understanding goes beyond the aspect of scaling-up successful co-productive infrastructure focused projects; rather, it indicates a different format of engagement for prompting urban stakeholders into planning citywide urban solutions. This article discusses the distinction between the different levels of co-production and their inter-linkages, and it investigates the relevance of positioning co-production as a factor framing urban governance. This includes a discussion on three main contradictions that can be identified within the current discussion on co-production. Finally, it identifies a set of arguments for elaborating the role of co-production in a policy and urban governance setting.
Resilience building has become a growing policy agenda, particularly for urban risk management. While much of the resilience agenda has been shaped by policies and discourses from the global North, its applicability for cities of the global South, particularly African cities, has not been sufficiently assessed. Focusing on rights of urban citizens as the object to be made resilient, rather than physical and ecological infrastructures, may help to address many of the root causes that characterize the unacceptable risks that urban residents face on a daily basis. Linked to this idea, we discuss four entry points for grounding a rights and justice orientation for urban resilience. First, notions of resilience must move away from narrow, financially oriented risk analyses. Second, opportunities must be created for “negotiated resilience”, to allow for attention to processes that support these goals, as well as for the integration of diverse interests. Third, achieving resilience in ways that do justice to the local realities of diverse urban contexts necessitates taking into account endogenous, locally situated processes, knowledges and norms. And finally, urban resilience needs to be placed within the context of global systems, providing an opportunity for African contributions to help reimagine the role that cities might play in these global financial, political and science processes.
This article proposes the concept of sustainable flood memory as a critical and agentic form of social and cultural remembering of learning to live with floods. Drawing upon research findings that use the 2007 floods in the South West of England as a case study, we explore and analyse the media representations of flooding, the role of community and communicative memory of past floods for fostering resilience, and map emotional and affective responses to floods. To approach flooding in this way is critical to understanding how communities engage in memory practices (remembering and strategically forgetting) in order to cope with environmental changes. Moreover, the article embraces a research design and strategy in which ‘memory studies’ is brought into a conversation not only with geography (mental maps), social sciences and flood risk management policy but also with stakeholders and communities who collect, archive and remember flood histories in their respective regions.
Floods are considered the most common and devastating type of disasters world-wide. Therefore, flood
management is a crucial task for municipalities- a task that requires dependable information to evaluate risks
and to react accordingly in a disaster scenario. Acquiring and maintaining this information using official data
however is not always feasible, especially for smaller municipalities. This issue could be approached by
integrating the collaborative maps of OpenStreetMap (OSM). The OSM data is openly accessible, adaptable and
continuously updated. Nonetheless, to make use of this data for effective decision support, the OSM data must
be first adapted to the needs of decision makers. In the pursuit of this goal, this paper presents the
OpenFloodRiskMap (OFRM)- a prototype for a OSM based spatial decision-support system. OFRM builds an
intuitive and practical interface upon existing OSM data and services to enable decision makers to utilize the
open data for emergency planning and response.
I define big data with respect to its size but pay particular attention to the fact that the data I am referring to is urban data, that is, data for cities that are invariably tagged to space and time. I argue that this sort of data are largely being streamed from sensors, and this represents a sea change in the kinds of data that we have about what happens where and when in cities. I describe how the growth of big data is shifting the emphasis from longer term strategic planning to short-term thinking about how cities function and can be managed, although with the possibility that over much longer periods of time, this kind of big data will become a source for information about every time horizon. By way of conclusion, I illustrate the need for new theory and analysis with respect to 6 months of smart travel card data of individual trips on Greater London’s public transport systems.
In recent years, social media emerged as a potential resource to improve the management of crisis situations such as disasters triggered by natural hazards. Although there is a growing research body concerned with the analysis of the usage of social media during disasters, most previous work has concentrated on using social media as a standalone information source, whereas its combination with other information sources holds a still underexplored potential. This article presents an approach to enhance the identification of relevant messages from social media that relies upon the relations between georeferenced social media messages as Volunteered Geographic Information and geographic features of flood phenomena as derived from authoritative data (sensor data, hydrological data and digital elevation models). We apply this approach to examine the micro-blogging text messages of the Twitter platform (tweets) produced during the River Elbe Flood of June 2013 in Germany. This is performed by means of a statistical analysis aimed at identifying general spatial patterns in the occurrence of flood-related tweets that may be associated with proximity to and severity of flood events. The results show that messages near (up to 10 km) to severely flooded areas have a much higher probability of being related to floods. In this manner, we conclude that the geographic approach proposed here provides a reliable quantitative indicator of the usefulness of messages from social media by leveraging existing knowledge about natural hazards such as floods, thus being valuable for disaster management in both crisis response and preventive monitoring.
The concept of ‘resilience’ was first adopted within systems ecology in the 1970s, where it marked a move away from the homeostasis of Cold War resource management toward the far-from-equilibrium models of second-order cybernetics or complex systems theory. Resilience as an operational strategy of risk management has more recently been taken up in financial, urban and environmental security discourses, where it reflects a general consensus about the necessity of adaptation through endogenous crisis. The generalization of complex systems theory as a methodology of power has ambivalent sources. While the redefinition of the concept can be directly traced to the work of the ecologist Crawford S. Holling, the deployment of complex systems theory is perfectly in accord with the later philosophy of the Austrian neoliberal Friedrich Hayek. This ambivalence is reflected in the trajectory of complex systems theory itself, from critique to methodology of power.
Making a city "smart" is emerging as a strategy to mitigate the problems generated by the urban population growth and rapid urbanization. Yet little academic research has sparingly discussed the phenomenon. To close the gap in the literature about smart cities and in response to the increasing use of the concept, this paper proposes a framework to understand the concept of smart cities. Based on the exploration of a wide and extensive array of literature from various disciplinary areas we identify eight critical factors of smart city initiatives: management and organization, technology, governance, policy context, people and communities, economy, built infrastructure, and natural environment. These factors form the basis of an integrative framework that can be used to examine how local governments are envisioning smart city initiatives. The framework suggests directions and agendas for smart city research and outlines practical implications for government professionals.
There is considerable federal interest in disaster resilience as a mechanism for mitigating the impacts to local communities, yet the identification of metrics and standards for measuring resilience remain a challenge. This paper provides a methodology and a set of indicators for measuring baseline characteristics of communities that foster resilience. By establishing baseline conditions, it becomes possible to monitor changes in resilience over time in particular places and to compare one place to another. We apply our methodology to counties within the Southeastern United States as a proof of concept. The results show that spatial variations in disaster resilience exist and are especially evident in the rural/urban divide, where metropolitan areas have higher levels of resilience than rural counties. However, the individual drivers of the disaster resilience (or lack thereof)-social, economic, institutional, infrastructure, and community capacities- vary widely.
This article defines social resilience as the ability of groups or communities to cope with external stresses and disturbances as a result of social, political and environmental change. This definition highlights social resilience in relation to the concept of ecological resilience which is a characteristic of ecosystems to maintain themselves in the face of disturbance. There is a clear link between social and ecological resilience, particularly for social groups or communities that are dependent on ecological and environmental resources for their livelihoods. But it is not clear whether resilient ecosystems enable resilient communities in such situations. This article examines whether resilience is a useful characteristic for describing the social and economic situation of social groups and explores potential links between social resilience and ecological resilience. The origins of this interdisciplinary study in human ecology, ecological economics and rural sociology are reviewed, and a study of the impacts of ecological change on a resourcedependent community in contemporary coastal Vietnam in terms of the resilience of its institutions is outlined.
If the purpose of evaluation is learning, dialogue can be an effective means for achieving this purpose. This chapter focuses on the crucial role of language in establishing the heuristic stance that fosters dialogic inquiry and thereby enhances the effectiveness of evaluation. The role of the evaluator in facilitating dialogue is explicated through examples from practice.
This paper argues that the way in which current regeneration evaluation is often constructed is focused upon performance management, with far less emphasis placed upon innovative, creative and learning elements. It also argues that a key omission in current evaluation research is a lack of appreciation of the negotiation of evaluator roles, which has implications for the extent to which the evaluator is independent or integrated into the regeneration process. From the authors' collective experiences of local regeneration evaluation and involvement in national evaluation programme evaluation, a typology of evaluation roles is constructed. Four narratives are developed of different roles that an evaluator might play — a monitor, a facilitator, a broker and a critical friend — and the impact that regeneration evaluation has on practice is discussed. The paper concludes by drawing out a series of learning points to help inform the everyday experience of regeneration managers and evaluators, and to assist in developing more appropriate local regeneration evaluation, which promotes an increasingly reflective learning practice.
Catastrophic events such as 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the Tohoku ‘Triple Disaster’ of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown that hit the eastern seaboard of Japan in 2012 are seen as surprises that have a low probability of occurring but have a debilitating impact when they do. In this eye-opening journey through modern and ancient risk management practices, the author explains why we need to find a new way to navigate the deeply uncertain world that we live in. Examining how governments have responded to terrorist threats, climate change, and natural hazards, the book shows how and why these measures have proven inadequate and what should be done to make us more resilient. While conventional approaches have focused on planning and preparing for disruptions and enhanced our ability to ‘bounce back’, our focus should be on anticipating future challenges and enhancing our capacity to adapt to new threats.
Literature on co-production is booming. Yet, most literature is aspirational and methodological in nature, focusing on why co-production is important for environmental governance and knowledge production and how it should be done, and does not address the question why these processes often fail to achieve stated objectives of empowerment and societal transformation. In this review, we address this gap by reviewing literature on the political and power dimensions of co-production. Our review shows how depoliticization dynamics in co-production reinforce rather than mitigate existing unequal power relations and how they prevent wider societal transformation from taking place. Drawing on literature about participation, deliberative governance, and democracy, the review concludes by emphasizing the importance of (re)politicizing co-production by allowing for pluralism and for the contestation of knowledge.
Research practice, funding agencies and global science organizations suggest that research aimed at addressing sustainability challenges is most effective when ‘co-produced’ by academics and non-academics. Co-production promises to address the complex nature of contemporary sustainability challenges better than more traditional scientific approaches. But definitions of knowledge co-production are diverse and often contradictory. We propose a set of four general principles that underlie high- quality knowledge co-production for sustainability research. Using these principles, we offer practical guidance on how to engage in meaningful co-productive practices, and how to evaluate their quality and success.
There is much discussion regarding the Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) capacity to promote inclusive development. While some argue that they represent an opportunity for goal-led alignment of stakeholders and evidence-based decision-making, other voices express concerns as they perceive them as a techno-managerial framework that measures development according to quantitatively defined parameters and does not allow for local variation. We argue that the extent to which the positive or negative aspects of the SDGs prevail depends on the monitoring system’s ability to account for multiple and intersecting inequalities. The need for sub-nationally (urban) representative indicators poses an additional methodological challenge—especially in cities with intra-urban inequalities related to socio-spatial variations across neighbourhoods. This paper investigates the extent to which the SDG indicators’ representativeness could be affected by inequalities. It does so by proposing a conceptual framing for understanding the relation between inequalities and SDG monitoring, which is then applied to analyse the current methodological proposals for the indicator framework of the “urban SDG,” Goal 11. The outcome is a call for (1) a more explicit attention to intra-urban inequalities, (2) the development of a methodological approach to “recalibrate” the city-level indicators to account for the degree of intra-urban inequalities, and (3) an alignment between methodologies and data practices applied for monitoring SDG 11 and the extent of the underlying inequalities within the city. This would enable an informed decision regarding the trade-off in indicator representativeness between conventional data sources, such as censuses and household surveys, and emerging methods, such as participatory geospatial methods and citizen-generated data practices.
The concept of resilience has become increasingly important to our understanding of contemporary planning policy and practice. Resilience offers a new and increasingly relevant set of ideas, tools and approaches to help understand the complexities of an increasingly urbanised world and in the provision of safety and security of communities against an array of perceived hazards and threats. In this paper we reflect upon the emergence and usage of resilience thinking in urban planning, highlighting how traditional planning practices might be seen as maladaptive in response to risk and create impediments to the actual use of resilience principles by planners. To conclude this paper we illuminate the urgent requirement to better connect theories of resilience to their actual practice in order to close the implementation gap in urban resilience praxis.
This article critically examines the performative politics of resilience in the context of the current UK Civil Contingencies (UKCC) agenda. It places resilience within a wider politics of (in)security that seeks to govern risk by folding uncertainty into everyday practices that plan for, pre-empt, and imagine extreme events. Moving beyond existing diagnoses of resilience based either on ecological adaptation or neoliberal governmentality, we develop a performative approach that highlights the instability, contingency, and ambiguity within attempts to govern uncertainties. This performative politics of resilience is investigated via two case studies that explore 1) critical national infrastructure protection and 2) humanitarian emergency preparedness. By drawing attention to the particularities of how resilient knowledge is performed and what it does in diverse contexts, we repoliticize resilience as an ongoing, incomplete, and potentially self-undermining discourse.
The productivity of government at all levels can be increased by introducing some of the principles that have already proved effective in some parts of the country. The idea behind these principles is that governments should be entrepreneurial.
Resilience is an increasingly important urban policy discourse that has been taken up at a rapid pace. Yet there is an apparent gap between the advocacy of social-ecological resilience in scientific literature and its take-up in policy discourse on the one hand, and the demonstrated capacity to govern for resilience in practice on the other. This paper explores this gap by developing a performative account of how social-ecological resilience is dealt with in practice through case study analysis of how protection of biodiversity was negotiated in response to Melbourne’s recent metropolitan planning initiative. It is suggested that a performative account expands the possible opportunities for governing for social-ecological resilience beyond the concept’s use as a metaphor, measurement, cognitive frame or programmatic statement of adaptive management/co-management and has the potential to emerge through what has been called the everyday ‘mangle of practice’ in response to social-ecological feedback inherent to policy processes.
Drawing on, and integrating, emerging theories and practices of urban resilience, this article charts the emergence and progression of different ‘waves’ of resilience policy in the UK. Specifically, it argues that changing practices of resilience have emerged both as a function of time, and in relation to a range of changing socio-political and economic pressures, which have re-articulated the meaning, scale, operational role of, and responsibility for, resilience. The article seeks to critique resilience policy, raising questions about the usefulness of emerging resilience as the central organising concept for depicting how urban systems respond to contemporary and future crises.
User and community co-production has always been important, but rarely noticed. However, there has recently been a movement towards seeing co-production as a key driver for improving publicly valued outcomes, e.g. through triggering behaviour change and preventing future problems. However, citizens are only willing to co-produce in a relatively narrow range of activities that are genuinely important to them and are keen that their co-production effort is not wasted by public agencies. Moreover, there are concerns that co-production may involve greater risks than professionalised service provision, although services may be quality assured more successfully through involving users and embedding them in the community. While offering potential significant improvements in outcomes, and cost savings, co-production is not resource-free. Co-production may be ‘value for money’, but it usually cannot produce value without money.
This article seeks to put the “public” back in public values research by theorizing about the potential of direct citizen participation to assist with identifying and understanding public values. Specifically, the article explores eight participatory design elements and offers nine propositions about how those elements are likely to affect the ability of administrators to identify and understand public values with regard to a policy conflict. The article concludes with a brief discussion about potential directions for future research.
Improving the qualities of places is attracting increasing policy and academic interest in contemporary Europe. This raises questions about the appropriate governance capacity to deliver such improvements. I argue that a key element of such capacity lies in the quality of local policy cultures. Some are well integrated, well connected, and well informed, and can mobilise readily to act to capture opportunities and enhance local conditions. Others are fragmented, lack the connections to sources of power and knowledge, and the mobilisation capacity, to organise to make a difference. In recent years, the emphasis in attempts to change urban governance capacity, particularly in Britain, has been on encouraging catalytic projects and partnerships. Recent experience across Europe suggests that wider transformative effects are difficult to achieve without careful consideration of the partnership form and how it connects to the wider policy culture. They may also have the effect of increasing the fragmentation of local capacity. I examine the potential of collaborative approaches in place-making initiatives in achieving more effective and durable transformations. Collaborative approaches emphasise the importance of building new policy discourses about the qualities of places, developing collaboration among stakeholders in policy development as well as delivery, widening stakeholder involvement beyond traditional power elites, recognising different forms of local knowledge, and building rich social networks as a resource of institutional capital through which new initiatives can be taken rapidly and legitimately. They shift the task of urban planning from 'building places' to fostering the institutional capacity in territorial political communities for ongoing 'place-making' activities.
The Politics of Co-Production: Participation, Power, and Transformation', Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability
- E Turnhout
- T Metze
- C Wyborn
- N Klenk
- E Louder
Turnhout, E., Metze, T., Wyborn, C., Klenk, N., and Louder, E. (2019). 'The Politics
of Co-Production: Participation, Power, and Transformation', Current Opinion in
Environmental Sustainability, 42(1), pp. 15-21.