09 Dec Exploring new forms of climate politics in Indian cities
Written by Vinita Govindarajan
Edited by Sofia Juliet Rajan
Building a ‘resilient’ city is a growing policy priority for Indian metropolises. The core question driving this thinking, as seen in this paper, is: How can a city’s economic activity, infrastructure and communities ‘bounce back’ from shocks and stresses, and continue to grow? Seven large Indian cities – Ahmedabad, Delhi, Bengaluru, Jaipur, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata – have already signed onto the C40 cities framework that outlines emission reduction targets for sectors like building, transport and waste. Some smaller cities like Coimbatore, Rajkot, and Surat are also taking climate action. But who is involved in crafting these initiatives, who benefits, and how they are implemented, ultimately dictates their success.
There is a growing call, particularly by civil society organisations, for climate action in Indian cities to be more socially inclusive, participatory, and democratic. Municipalities and civil society groups have begun public consultations, workshops, community awareness programmes, and vulnerability mapping exercises. Given that it is the most marginalised who bear the brunt of rising temperatures, frequent flooding and other climate impacts, their lived experiences and knowledge are important for effective climate change efforts.
But even the growing popularity of participatory methods and their execution run the risk of being tokenistic, elite-led and not truly inclusive of diverse voices. A key question that is missing is: What are the structural conditions forcing some groups to be marginalised and vulnerable, and in response, be resilient? Many plans get criticised as being top-down and technocratic, co-opted by institutions interested in numerical targets, growth narratives and technological fixes, rather than addressing urban inequalities, identities, cultures and everyday lives and practices.
So, what do meaningful forms of participatory and democratic urban governance look like in our climate-changed world? What are the new kinds of urban politics produced by these climate action plans? A plural and representative urban climate agenda requires, at the very least, two potential shifts in how we approach urban planning.
First, it needs to acknowledge the unique challenges of Indian cities and their inequalities. At present, climate action planning remains largely ahistorical, and often apolitical. We see a lot of focus on tree plantations, lake beautification, and retrofitting buildings. However, these initiatives rarely tackle urban inequalities, such as the deep-rooted spatial segregation by class and caste or the struggles of migrant workers living in flood-prone informal settlements.
Second, we need to be more critical about how inclusive spaces are created and what they achieve. In Bengaluru, for example, non-governmental organisations have been organising consultations with vulnerable groups such as senior citizens and transgender communities to understand their perceptions of how climate change impacts. The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike’s (BBMP) Bengaluru Climate Action Cell has also held public town hall meetings with invited practitioners to share their work and gather feedback. Such spaces, while open for engagement, are not necessarily where the public is truly involved in decision-making or knowledge creation. As I noticed in one such event, often, the agenda is set, and the audience is invited.
Keeping an eye on the future
Globally, various forms of visioning workshops are popular platforms for future planning. These workshops enable urban residents to project their (often utopic) visions of a good city or neighbourhood. They are meant to be spaces of possibility, of future imaginings of the city, and yet spaces engineered to reflect the organisers’ agenda. For instance, the UNDP’s 2022 Foresight Playbook offers a variety of tools and methods such as scenario planning, driver mapping, backcasting, that are increasingly popular in policy circles and consulting practice. Each of these tools is derived from a philosophy or school of thought. Scenario planning assumes that the future is uncertain but can be shaped by human choice and action. Another interesting method is causal layered analysis, introduced by Sohail Inayatullah, which stems from the idea that at the core of any problem or policy lie narratives, stories and worldviews that give policies their underlying assumptions and legitimacy. Often, a combination of these methods along with other accessible methods like participatory sketching, are used to excavate the aspirations and future urban imaginings of different groups of people.
These workshops are where urban policy is often developed. But how these workshops are designed reveals a lot—the participants involved, their power dynamics, the role of researchers and facilitators, and the level of engagement. The question of engagement with migrant workers, for instance, remains unsettled. A migrant-friendly climate action plan would need consistent engagement, where residents of migrant settlements are actively involved in shaping the focus and direction of the discussion, beyond merely reporting their grievances or perceptions of climate change. To involve migrants also means to engage both with their life histories and experiences, as well as their visions for the future of the city, what aspects of home they bring with them, their knowledges and practices, unique coping strategies and what cultures and traditions they aspire to carry forward in the new city that will become their home.
Workshops like these are examples of how participatory democratic politics has developed in the face of climate change. But a few hours of engagement can only go far in framing an issue beyond a ‘problem’ to solve. It remains to be seen how Indian cities, along with their unique challenges, collective and individual agencies, vulnerabilities and diversity, engage with these new participatory forms of urban climate planning.
Vinita Govindarajan is a PhD student in Urban Planning at Columbia University.
Further Reading:
- Butler, J. R. A., Bohensky, E. L., Suadnya, W., Yanuartati, Y., Handayani, T., Habibi, P., … & Sutaryono, Y. (2016). Scenario planning to leap-frog the Sustainable Development Goals: An adaptation pathways approach. Climate Risk Management, 12, 83-99.
- Chu, E., Anguelovski, I., & Carmin, J. (2016). Inclusive approaches to urban climate adaptation planning and implementation in the Global South. Climate Policy, 16(3), 372-392.
- Gidley, J. M., Fien, J., Smith, J. A., Thomsen, D. C., & Smith, T. F. (2009). Participatory futures methods: towards adaptability and resilience in climate‐vulnerable communities. Environmental Policy and Governance, 19(6), 427-440.
- Inayatullah, S. (1998). Causal layered analysis: Poststructuralism as method. Futures, 30(8), 815-829.
- Inayatullah, S. (2009). Causal layered analysis: An integrative and transformative theory and method. Futures research methodology, version, 3
- Nadimpalli, S., Mathew, S., & Cheranda, T. M. (Re) envisioning inclusive futures: Applying narrative foresight to deconstruct the problem of urban flooding in the slums of Bengaluru, India. Development Policy Review, e12786
- Nygrén, N. A. (2019). Scenario workshops as a tool for participatory planning in a case of lake management. Futures, 107, 29-44.
- Pelling, M., Comelli, T., Cordova, M., Kalaycioğlu, S., Menoscal, J., Upadhyaya, R., & Garschagen, M. (2023). Normative future visioning for city resilience and development. Climate and Development, 16(4), 335–348.
- Törnroth, S., Day, J., Fürst, M. F., & Mander, S. (2022). Participatory utopian sketching: A methodological framework for collaborative citizen (re) imagination of urban spatial futures. Futures, 139, 102938.
- Wang, C., & Burris, M. A. (1997). Photovoice: Concept, methodology, and use for participatory needs assessment. Health education & behavior, 24(3), 369-387
- Zackery, A., Demneh, M. T., Karimi, A., & Nejad, M. E. (2022). Insights from a Causal Layered Analysis of” Isfahan 2040″: A Participatory Foresight Workshop. Journal of Futures Studies, 26(4).