Resilience Planning to Climate Change in Ghana: Community Participation and Social Equity
Files
(Library staff access only)
Date
2023
Authors
Amegavi, George Babington
Editors
Advisors
Nursey-Bray, Melissa
Suh, Jungho
Suh, Jungho
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Type:
Thesis
Citation
Statement of Responsibility
Conference Name
Abstract
The growing recognition of climate change risk and uncertainty and the associated deleterious impacts on cities has led to increased efforts to find strategies to address and mitigate climate change risks. Resilience has emerged as an idea that can help cities withstand and adapt to these uncertainties and risks. Resilience, however, is a contested development concept with no planning and implementation blueprint. As a result, there is growing contemporary interest in how practitioners interpret the concept and address participation and social equity issues in resilience planning. This thesis engages this timely issue, by investigating community participation in urban resilience planning in Ghana.
I used a mixed method research approach and collected data from three communities in Accra. The research data was collected using semi-structured interviews, document analysis, observations, and questionnaire-based surveys. I specifically, explored how practitioners interpret urban resilience, how communities are involved in urban resilience planning, how decisions are made, why some groups are excluded from the decision-making process, and the perceptual factors that influence and determine actor willingness or unwillingness towards participation in resilience planning.
The research shows that urban resilience planning processes are significantly influenced by the perceptions of planning authorities and that planning arrangements protect and reinforce the status quo, thereby reproducing trajectories of inequitable community participation in urban resilience planning. Specifically, the research findings reveal differences in how government and non-government practitioners interpret urban resilience. Most notably in their focus on either, the engineering or socio-ecological resilience view. Overall, the government practitioners are influenced by the need to maintain existing status quo interpret urban resilience as a bouncing back phenomenon. However, the non-government practitioners influenced by the need for change consider urban resilience as a transformational concept that moves cities into a better state after a disaster. The results highlight the role of context in defining urban resilience and show that differences in sectors and lived realities continue to make for different interpretations.
The results indicated that the adoption of processes and mechanisms to facilitate participation do not automatically facilitate community participation in practice. Through the unequal powers between communities and planning authorities, planning authorities determine the terms of community involvement thus, the terms of community participation remained significantly passive and inequitable with limited decision-making powers. Therefore, the poor community involvement in urban resilience planning is not a function of their unwillingness to participate, but rather of their ‘adverse involvement’ whereby the terms of their participation are relatively inequitable. The study concludes that community involvement in urban resilience planning does not necessarily equate to equitable participation. Incorporating governance and social dimensions in resilience holds enormous promise for advancing community participation in urban resilience planning that is politically feasible and socially equitable. This suggested approach will provide opportunities to address the current planning inequities and enable fair and just community participation outcomes in resilience planning.
School/Discipline
School of Social Sciences
Dissertation Note
Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Social Sciences, 2023
Provenance
This thesis is currently under embargo and not available.