Weeding out the grassroots in a concrete jungle: reflections from Dhaka, Bangladesh

From Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement and Argentina’s Piqueteros, to South Africa’s Homeless People’s Federation and Bangladesh’s Coalition of Urban Poor, collective struggles over land, housing and labour increasingly inform our understandings of social justice in cities of the Global South. However, can this global lens overlook local level complexities? What role do grassroots organisations play? In this post, Sally Cawood takes us to Dhaka, Bangladesh, where she is conducting fieldwork on Community Based Organisations (CBOs) in Dhaka’s informal settlements (bustees). For Sally, unearthing networks of friends, families and neighbours within these organisations, is crucial to understanding social development in context

Water delivery configurations and CBOs in Dhaka’s slums, Bangladesh: lessons for WASH sustainability

In Dhaka, Bangladesh over five million bustee (slum) dwellers access water via self-help, NonGovernmental Organisations (NGOs), Community-Based Organisations (CBOs), donors, samity’s (cooperative societies), illegal vendors, local leaders, politicians, private landowners and some government agencies. These diverse ‘delivery configurations’ (Olivier de Sardan 2010; 2011; Jaglin 2014) have implications for WASH sustainability, the terms and cost of access. Drawing on in-depth fieldwork in three bustees, and citywide interviews with NGO and government officials, this paper outlines how NGO-initiated CBOs access legal water connections. Whilst CBOs play an increasingly important role, the extent to which supply (and associated hardware) remains functional, affordable and equitable in this context, is disputed. Findings highlight the importance of a more coordinated and integrated approach to water, sanitation, hygiene and land tenure security, for enhanced WASH sustainability in urban low-income settlements

Should our academic approach towards researching South asia change due to COVID-19?

As COVID-19 disrupts established research norms, many methodological and ethical questions have come to the forefront of the debate on how we study South Asia. Here Nabeela Ahmed, Sally Cawood, Sarita Panday, Megnaa Mehtta, Glyn Williams, Jiban Kumar Karki and Ankit Kumar (Research collective, University of Sheffield) reflect on their recent discussions on whether researchers should consider changing the way they conduct their work in the wake of the pandemic

Redefining the role of urban studies Early Career Academics in the post-COVID-19 university

We are an international collective of Early Career Academics (ECAs) who met throughout 2020 to explore the implications of COVID-19 on precarious academics. With this intervention, our aims are to voice commonly shared experiences and concerns and to reflect on the extent to which the pandemic offers opportunities to redefine Higher Education and research institutions, in a context of ongoing precarity and funding cuts. Specifically, we explore avenues to build solidarity across institutions and geographies, to ensure that the conduct of urban research, and support offered to ECAs, allows for more inclusivity, diversity, security and equitability. *The Urban ECA Collective emerged from a workshop series described in this article which intended to foster international solidarity among self-defined early career academics working within urban research.ITESO, A.C

Limits to and opportunities for scaling participation:lessons from three city-wide urban poor networks in Dhaka, Bangladesh

In Dhaka, three urban poor networks play a central role in advocating for the rights and entitlements of low-income settlement residents. Despite their numerous achievements, this article outlines how attempts to scale participation via these networks are limited by three overlapping state–civil society processes: (1) the politicization and increased monitoring of non-governmental organizations (NGOs); (2) shifting donor preferences towards service delivery and the creation of new community-based organizations (CBOs); and (3) the ongoing dominance and paternalism of NGOs towards low-income settlement residents. By situating these findings within existing understandings of in/formal governance and political participation, it can be argued that attempts to scale may struggle to evade or transform deep structures of dependency, patronage and intermediation. Recognizing that scaling can and does occur under these conditions, the article outlines opportunities to support the city-wide networks and alternative forms of organizing, to address pressing needs and priorities

The lived experience of climate change impacts and adaptation in low income settlements

This chapter unpacks the highly complex and value-laden terms ‘urban poverty’ and ‘climate change’, with a specific focus on who the urban poor are, where they live and how climate change exacerbates their existing vulnerabilities. With particular emphasis on everyday, lived experiences, the chapter demonstrates how the urban poor are already coping and/or adapting to these impacts in diverse ways. Finally, the chapter draws together the key concepts (e.g. participation, co-creation, resilience and transformation) noted above, exploring their relevance to current policy and planning on urban poverty and climate change. Three key themes drawn from the two research projects and associated papers are used to structure the remainder of the book – vulnerability, adaptation and the built environment; understanding change and adaptation: from institutional interface to co-production; and from learning to knowledge, innovation to action

Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of the key concerns, concepts and principles that bind the empirical cases presented in 12 subsequent chapters. In particular, it raises two concerns: (a) that understanding multifaceted urban poverty requires a conscious consideration of climate change as a global process with local impacts; and (b) there is a lack of meaningful action to incorporate and understand climate change impacts on the urban poor. It also raises five concepts and principles: participation; adaptation; co-creation; resilience; and transformation

Conclusion: Reconceptualising adaptation and comparing experiences

This chapter draws out key ideas and recommendations about ‘the way forward’, bringing the recent policy developments (AR5, the SDGs, COP 21 and Habitat III) into dialogue with the rich material presented in this book. Evidently, context is central to understanding adaptation processes. The types of impact that climate change imposes and the responses of households, communities and municipal authorities to those impacts are very much dependent on the specific environmental, socio-economic and institutional context. In almost all cases presented here, households and communities are actively adapting but the effectiveness of those adaptations varies greatly both within and between cases. Towards the end of the conclusion, we re-engage with the ‘ladder of adaptive capacity’ presented in Chapter 2 , to shape our understanding of the diverse forms of adaptation across the chapters. This framework is proposed as an analytical device rather than a ‘best practice’ prescription. In an ideal world all adaptation would be transformative, but in reality, with households and communities having very different levels of capacity for collective action and highly varied external institutions to partner with, moving from acquiescence to coping and/or from coping to progressive adaptation may be a ‘best fit’ approach