Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses
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ItemEndogenous Climate Resilience: Informal Adaptation Pathways in the Pacific’s Small Island Developing Cities( 2020)More than half of the world’s population currently lives in cities, with an additional 2.5 billion people projected to join these urban inhabitants by the middle of the 21st century. With urban areas being both responsible for the vast majority of carbon emissions associated with energy use, and simultaneously facing substantive risks associated with climate impacts, it is clear that efforts to both mitigate and adapt to climate change impacts will be ‘won or lost’ in cities. The term resilience is increasingly being applied to these urban systems, particularly in reference to climate-driven shocks and stresses. The uptake of resilience thinking has been driven in part by its capacity to bridge climate mitigation and adaptation, while incorporating additional fields and methodologies such as those associated with disaster risk management. This flexibility has been particularly appealing to international development actors and institutions, who have accelerated the term’s national and sub-national uptake through the embedding of resilience language in international policy frameworks and financing mechanisms. Resilience’s conceptual fluidity, however, has led to sustained criticism from social scientists. These critiques have focused particularly on three areas: resilience thinking’s lack of sensitivity to social inequality; the risk of divergence in normative perceptions of ‘core’ urban functions; and a capacity for the term to facilitate the devolution of the state’s duty of care to its most vulnerable citizens. These concerns are especially pertinent for informal settlements, which house an estimated 880 million urban inhabitants globally and operate outside of institutionally recognised urban structures and systems. This thesis examines the interaction between informally derived endogenous climate resilience and donor-driven exogenous climate resilient development initiatives in two Pacific cities: Honiara, Solomon Islands and Port Vila, Vanuatu. These two case studies provide critical insight into the accelerating process of urbanisation in a region characterised as one of the world’s most climate vulnerable, focused through the experiences of two major climate-driven shock events. Drawing on primary data from interviews with representatives from six informal settlements (n=57) as well as institutions engaged in the deployment of climate resilient development initiatives (n=26), I identify how the endogenous forms of climate resilience that are prevalent in informal settlements interact with donor-driven, exogenous development initiatives. These primary datasets have been integrated with analysis of project documentation, policies and finance, as well as sociodemographic and spatial data. The results from this research demonstrate that ‘informal climate resilience’ is an integral part of sub-city systems, especially – but not exclusively – informal settlements. These forms of endogenous resilience are shown to be critical to the recovery, survival, and development of climate vulnerable communities. At the same time, they remain disconnected from institutional resilience-building efforts. Their prevalence, at times in conflict with city-scale values and functional assumptions, is found to be largely unrecognised within contemporary resilience theorisations and practice. By adapting resilience thinking heuristics originating from ecological applications – set within institutional analytical frameworks for engaging with informality – this research identifies strategies for engaging with informal climate resilience, with the potential for application within and beyond the Pacific.