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Participatory planning and climate compatible development

By ucfuvca, on 4 February 2016

The book ‘Participatory Planning for Climate Compatible Development’ advances a key argument about the need to involve urban citizens in local action for climate adaptation. The book present the insights from a CDKN-funded project called Public-Private-People Partnerships for Climate Compatible Development (2011-2013), which brought together policy makers, academics and activists from Mozambique with a group of ‘pracademics’ (or practice-oriented academics) based in the UK.

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The project started by bringing together two fundamental concerns. First, we perceived that much of the response to climate change, both for mitigation and adaptation, related to the management of infrastructure at the local level. Here, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that in the absence of capacity and resources for coordinate action at the national or local level, a myriad of actors from small business to community organisations can play a role in delivering sustainability outcomes at the local level. Hence, we focused on the notion of partnerships as a means to build capacity through the collaboration between different types of institutions. We challenged the notion of public-private partnership as the only way in which effective partnerships happen, focusing instead on the variety of cross-sectoral partnerships that may improve service delivery at the local level.[1]

Second, we believe that creating long-lasting partnerships required a process of institutional development whereby sectors of the city whose voice may not always be heard could be incorporated in thinking about the future of their neighbourhood and the city as a whole. Participatory planning was conceptualised here as a means to develop such institutions, to establish a process of dialogue from the bottom up. Our insights suggest that, in an urban context, participatory planning not only does not pose an obstacle for effective climate action, but also may be the most effective means to deliver it.

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Deliberative planning methods are appropriate to develop a democratic culture of partnership-making, which recognises the human rights of urban populations and how they perceive their life could be improved. Participatory methods are also efficient and fast means to find out what is the best way to improve the adaptation of communities that suffer the impacts of climate change. In that sense, this book reports on our own experience including: the need to tie climate change knowledge to personal experiences of extreme events such as flooding; the practical difficulties that we encountered to deliver participatory planning as a sequence of events; and the aspiration that participatory planning could lead to broader changes though a process of partnership building.

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Our objective was to deliver an optimistic and forward-looking account of how to engage with communities for climate compatible development in a matter that makes a difference to their lives. The book also exposes, however, the limitations of a one-off engagement project to create lasting, transformative change. In this sense, we see this book as the beginning of a long engagement with the communities of Maputo, their aspirations, and the multiple possibilities to create a better city in the context of climate change.

[1]For a critical discussion see: Castán Broto V, Macucule DA, Boyd E, et al. (2015) Building Collaborative Partnerships for Climate Change Action in Maputo, Mozambique. Environment and Planning A 47: 571-587.