Local agency, adaptation and the shadow system: The institutional architecture of social learning in rural areas of the UK and India

Rural communities across the world face at times a range of environmental, social and economic pressures that threaten their viability in their current form. The ability of local actors to exercise agency in response to potential and emerging threats is of key interest in understanding their capacity to adapt. This paper argues that top-down narratives which focus on canonical organisations and formal institutions are at best a partial account of rural adaptation. More attention needs to be paid to the shadow system, the web of informal and often hidden relationships that permeate public and private life. In the organisational and institutional literature, shadow systems have been discounted as either too complex to be tractable or an inevitable source of corruption and nepotism. Two case studies are presented to establish that neither claim is inexorably true: (i) the adaptation of dairy farmers to market and climate change in Carmarthenshire, South Wales and (ii) NGO mediation of community/state interaction in Tamilnadu, South India. In conclusion, some theoretical and methodological themes are highlighted for further research. These hold the potential to enable a better understanding of the shadow system, and its potential and pitfalls as a site of local agency in rural adaptation. Acnowledgements: This paper draws on learning from two research projects: (i) 'Rapid climate change in the UK: towards an institutional theory of adaptation', funded by the UK Economic and Social Science Research Council's Environment and Human Behaviour Programme, and (ii) 'Thaan Vuzha Nilam Tharisu: The land without a farmer becomes barren', carried out by SPEECH, a Tamil NGO, as part of a larger International Institute for Environment and Development research programme – 'Policies that Work for Sustainable Agriculture and Regenerating Rural Economies.� The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial and institutional assistance that made this research possible

Understanding informal institutions: Networks and communities in rural development

A major theme within the literature on rural development is that the particular mix of formal and informal institutions present in any situation is a key determinant of development outcomes. However, there is some evidence that in policy and practice there are considerable difficulties in articulating formal organizational realities with the rules and norms embedded in informally constructed social structures. The same difficulty is in evidence in the New Institutional Economics, where the mainstream literature concedes the critical importance of informal and cultural institutions, but has thus far failed to develop an adequate theory of the informal. This recognized weakness is all the more urgent because of the growing emphasis on governance, participation and social learning evident in European rural development policy and practice. A clear understanding of the opportunities and pitfalls that arise in working with informal institutions is required, and therefore theories that provide analytical and operational traction in the 'parallel' realities of the formal and the informal. This paper starts from the point of view that at the heart of the institutional dilemma lies a difficulty in conceptualising the informal social structures in which informal institutions are reproduced. A review of relevant bodies of theory is presented; drawing on sociological network theory, perspectives on governance and social capital, and new developments in the organisational and management literature. These suggest some starting points for a theory of informal social realities and the institutions that structure them. The paper concludes with a presentation of a theoretical framework for understanding informal structures in rural development in terms of networks and communities

Breaking the cycle of risk accumulation in Sub-Saharan Africa

Urban Africa: Risk Knowledge is a three-year research and capacity building programme funded by DFID and ESRC that works in nine Sub-Saharan Africa cities. It involves academic and NGO partners from developed and developing countries and aims at breaking cycles of urban risk accumulation by bringing together science, policy and civil society actors in the production of knowledge and action. The objective of the programme is to better understand the urban processes that place families in exposure to hazard and in a lack of capacity to cope with the impact of these hazards.Current trends are going towards increasing vulnerability since existing infrastructure and services are unable to cope with growing population and climate change is adding stress to these infrastructures. The belief that drives the programme is that for resilience to be built that meets the needs of the urban poor, the starting point is to build strong relationships that can lead to collaborations between communities and city authorities, inform decision-making, inspire populations to manage their own risk and hold government to account. In Kenya, where the research was implemented, local governance structures were created to implement a community-based risk management approach deployed by residents

Tomorrow’s Cities and Covid-19: A discussion

Covid-19 has changed the context for working and will likely change the local and policy landscape for the Tomorrow's Cities Hub - it has and will have a major relevance for our collective work and its legacy. In this document we outline the main aims for Tomorrow’s Cities and map out five entry points for working with Covid-19. These offer initial thoughts on how Covid-19 might be considered in our collective work, as well as opportunities for contributing to policy or practice on Covid-19 within broader processes of equitable resilience building. Discussion does not seek to cover all the areas of relevance that disaster risk management, crisis management, resilience or transformative action can bring (this is no less important but the focus for another conversation!). The aim here is to identify the specific contribution of Tomorrow’s Cities Hub given focus by our: Mission: To reduce disaster risk for the poor in tomorrow’s cities and Aim: To catalyse a transition from crisis management to multi-hazard risk-informed urban planning and decision-makin

A political ecology of urban flood hazard and social vulnerability in Guyana.

During the 1990s vulnerability analysis has brought political ecology into the study of hazards, and in so doing allowed the study of risk in society/environment relations to engage more directly with broader issues of social science interest. This approach acknowledges that hazards are the product of risk and vulnerability but focuses primarily on the ways in which social organisation influences the distribution of hazard impacts; when and where risk becomes hazard, who is affected. if and how people respond and the extent to which hazard events may provide opportunities for, as well as constraints on, society. The vulnerabilities approach rests upon two key conceptual tools, the Pressure and Release Model and the Access Model, which were designed for use in exploring a wide variety of stressful events. Their utility in an urban flood hazard context is, however, limited because of a lack of meso-level conceptual tools and models. This weakness was overcome by bringing in a range of tools from the urban management literature which can also be combined within a political ecology frame. For the 90% of the Guyanese population, resident on the Atlantic coastal plain. flood hazard as a consequence of episodic and everyday events is an ongoing problem manifesting in collective and individual vulnerabilities, and a problem which is likely to become more acute as a consequence of global climate change. This project sought both to identify superficial experiences of hazard and vulnerability, and the deeper human and physical processes producing risk and vulnerability. National level experience and vulnerability indicators were gathered from a review of secondary data from the press, consultants' reports and government and academic publications. Following this, the first stage of primary field research identified the extent to which vulnerability indicators were associated with observed vulnerability and flood impact in both urban and peri-urban case studies. The second stage of field research examined local social/political-economic relations and their role in directing the flow of resources for environmental management and, consequently, in shaping distributions of vulnerability within the case study areas. For households in peri-urban and urban neighbourhoods economic and social assets are shown to be equally important for shaping the distribution of vulnerabilities; however, for low-income groups, and for squatter communities in particular, social assets are often the key to mitigating vulnerability. The importance of social assets at the household level contrasts with the weakened condition of social capital locally, and within Guyana as a whole. Locally, the low level of social capital was seen in a withdrawal of households from communal activity and a preference for investing in flood adaptation mechanisms within the household or extended family, and by topdown constructions of community and unrepresentative and unresponsive leadership serving to deepen dependency and alienation from the decision-making process. At a national level, government and public institutions are weak and ineffective, the private sector and civil society are undeveloped with few inter-sectoral linkages being maintained. Failures in social development and the low level of social capital are identified as key determinants in the production of vulnerability despite democratisation and structural adjustment which has promoted both privatisation and the funding of community sponsored development

The Whole of Culture Approach: A Research Agenda to Support Transition From Risk Management to Risk Sensitive Development

Managing disaster risk is about a good deal more than disaster risk management. Risk and loss arise from the accumulated legacy of decision-making and decision-making contexts that enmesh the environmental, technological and human to go far beyond the purview of risk managers, humanitarian agencies and first responders. How then to orient disasters research to better open development processes and attendant governance as central components for risk reduction? The whole of culture approach offers one response to this challenge. Influence over disaster risk and loss outcomes is shaped by the intersection of individual decision-making processes with informal and formal norms, organisational structures and tools. Human behaviour as part of development does not have a linear association with policy, norms or capacity but brings multiple, often hidden and open-ended, interactions between identity, behaviour, framing systems of legislation and social norms cross-cut by knowledge. Knowledge is always contested and contextual. Science methodologies attempt to make their social framing and underlying assumptions transparent, but are not always successful in communicating these. Once in the public domain even the most transparent and careful science products become part of a knowledge ecosystem including local knowledge, personal experience, social media and the vested communications of government, civil society and private sector interests (Nalau et al 2018). We argue that amongst this complexity, knowledge production, control, interpretation and use offers a key to understanding action within development that influences risk. This view holds for individuals at risk and also for planners, investors, managers and politicians holding influential decision-making positions. The perspective offered derives from contemporary work on social theory including assemblage theory and science and technology studies and from methodological experience, especially in coproduction, interdisciplinarity and action research. The whole of culture approach is proposed not only because of recent innovations but also in response to a renewed sense of urgency around the need for joined up action on the root causes of risk. Risk root causes are embedded in ongoing and everyday development vision and actions, yet risk management finds it difficult to be a central concern for development actors. This is a longstanding challenge. In 1983, James Hewitt observed that disaster risk management was an archipelago to development – connected but at the same time held at distance, informing but marginal to development vision and outcomes. This characterisation of a disaster risk science and management toolkit somehow removed from the levers of decision-making continues today. Lewis and Kelman (2007) capture the current concern by calling for an extension in the focus of risk reduction to confront also risk creation – the knowing or accidental creation of vulnerability and hazard exposure through development decisions from the household to the international. This concern is heightened as processes of globalisation and interdependent infrastructure systems (including those of the informal sector) mean that risk and loss can cascade across places with impacts moving across sectors (UNDRR 2013). Already heightened by the observed effects of climate change as an impact multiplier on development failure, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this concern. The impacts of COVID-19 and management responses have demonstrated how many of the root causes of vulnerability to natural hazards (overcrowded dwellings, inadequate access to clean water, limited primary health care, educational inequality, social marginalisation, exposure to violence, distrust of official agencies) are made worse by the predominant economic and social structures at the heart of development. These inequalities have long been recorded, the association with disaster risk long known, but development practice has been consistently ineffective in taking action. The paper first accounts for the ways in which culture has been brought into risk and disaster studies and then describes the long-standing desire from researchers and practitioners to better understand and act on risk creation as a development, not a risk management concern. The whole of culture approach is built from innovation across assemblage thinking, science and technology studies, interdisciplinarity and coproduction which are presented and then summarised before being applied to an urban research programme to test the relevance of the approach

Leaving no one behind in Tomorrow’s Cities: strengthening gender, intersectionality and social inclusion in the COVID-19 crisis and beyond

This comment identifies four mechanisms through which the COVID-19 crisis can be leveraged to enhance awareness and integration of marginalized groups and individuals into research and management of multi-hazard risk. The primary focus is on women and girls, but the analysis is intersectional and considers also marginality by disability, age, ethnicity and citizenship. The comment recommends: • Ensuring equal representation and meaningful participation in disaster (including pandemic) management by women, non-binary and gender non-conforming persons and grass-roots communities. • Application of sex-age, disability inclusive disaggregated data and targeted interventions for all vulnerable groups. • Gender inclusive social protection and financing for economic response and recovery. • Leaving no one behind in building back to a new normal

Partnerships for the 2030 Agenda

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015, provides a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future. It brings together the ambition of several agreements, some of which are particularly relevant to disaster risk reduction. Science requires partnerships to help bring solutions to address global challenges—but these can take many forms. This article explores how well Tomorrow's Cities is meeting some particular partnership challenges presented by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development