As cities increasingly engage in climate adaptation planning, many are seeking to promote public participation and facilitate the engagement of different civil society actors. Still, the variations that exist among participatory approaches and the merits and tradeoffs associated with each are not well understood. This article examines the experiences of Quito (Ecuador) and Surat (India) to assess how civil society actors contribute to adaptation planning and implementation. The results showcase two distinct approaches to public engagement. The first emphasizes participation of experts, affected communities, and a wide array of citizens to sustain broadly inclusive programmes that incorporate local needs and concerns into adaptation processes and outcomes. The second approach focuses on building targeted partnerships between key government, private, and civil society actors to institutionalize robust decision-making structures, enhance abilities to raise funds, and increase means to directly engage with local community and international actors. A critical analysis of these approaches suggests more inclusive planning processes correspond to higher climate equity and justice outcomes in the short term, but the results also indicate that an emphasis on building dedicated multi-sector governance institutions may enhance long-term programme stability, while ensuring that diverse civil society actors have an ongoing voice in climate adaptation planning and implementation.
Policy relevance
Many local governments in the Global South experience severe capacity and resource constraints. Cities are often required to devolve large-scale planning and decision-making responsibilities, such as those critical to climate adaptation, to different civil society actors. As a result, there needs to be more rigorous assessments of how civil society participation contributes to the adaptation policy and planning process and what local social, political, and economic factors dictate the way cities select different approaches to public engagement. Also, since social equity and justice are key indicators for determining the effectiveness and sustainability of adaptation interventions, urban adaptation plans and policies must also be designed according to local institutional strengths and civic capacities in order to account for the needs of the poor and most vulnerable. Inclusivity, therefore, is critical for ensuring equitable planning processes and just adaptation outcomes. 相似文献
Children and youth are a key target group for interventions to address southern Africa’s AIDS pandemic. Such interventions are frequently implemented through schools, and are often complex products of negotiation between a range of institutional actors including international agencies, NGOs, government departments and individual schools. These institutions not only stand in different (horizontally scaled) spatial relationships to students in schools; they also appear to operate at different hierarchical levels. Empirical research with policy makers and practitioners in Lesotho, however, reveals how interventions are produced through flows of knowledge, funding and personnel within and between institutions that make it difficult to assert that any intervention is manifestly more international or more local than any other. Scale theory offers the metaphor of a network or web which usefully serves to move attention away from discrete organisations, sectors and scalar positionings and onto the relationships and flows between them. Nevertheless, organisations and development interventions are often partly structured in scalar hierarchical ways that express substantive power differentials and shape the forms of interaction that take place, albeit not binding them to strict binaries or nested hierarchies. A modified network metaphor is useful in aiding understanding of how particular interventions are produced through intermeshing scales and diverse fluid interactions, and why they take the form they do. 相似文献