How to create true resilience

Fighting injustice helps in creating resilient urban spaces, write and

But balancing resilience and justice is a trickier proposition.

The City of Cape Town offers an example of this challenge.

City council officials were aware of the need to manage their water leakage problem and realised many households with high bills and leakages were relatively poor.

The city council developed a programme to fit water management devices in the homes of poor people who have high water bills. These devices limit household water supply to 350 litres a day (based on households’ free water of 6kl per month plus an extra 4.5kl of free water monthly). When installed, the household debt is written off and the water leaks are fixed.

From the city council’s point of view, this programme is increasing resilience through securing water supply and debt management for indigent households.

But residents find these devices punitive and unjust. Many have found 350 litres are not enough and leaks often resurface. Because the meter begins recording water use at about 4.30am, the allocated water can be gone by 6am if there are leaks. This is just when the household needs the water. Households often end up asking neighbours for water, and find it hard to meet their economic and household water needs.

Another example of the problems inherent in balancing issues of justice and resilience comes from the city of Mzuzu, in northern Malawi. Here, flooding poses a major risk to the city. To reduce the impact of flooding, the city introduced building codes that would make houses more resistant.

But what the city didn’t foresee was the higher expense of building houses that could meet these codes would push people away from formally planned areas to build in informal, unplanned settlements. Unsurprisingly, the areas where they have settled are the only ones available, precisely because they are most vulnerable to flooding, for example along the steep riverbanks. And so people find themselves pushed by circumstances to build their non-code-compliant housing in the most flood- prone areas of the city.

The people driving resilience interventions are often in powerful positions. And there’s limited room for more marginalised groups to have their voices heard. The City of Cape Town, for example, didn’t consult local communities before putting in the water management devices. They just did it.

Resilience approaches tend not to be pro-poor, and issues of justice are often not considered. So, if resilience efforts don’t explicitly consider justice issues, they will end up making those who are the most in need of building resilience the least resilient.

But without justice, inequality can’t be reduced, nor can well-being be improved. And if people are poor, suffer high inequality and have low levels of well-being, they can’t withstand or respond to shocks and stresses well: the very thing that resilience-building is supposed to address.

There are no easy answers to ensure resilience approaches don’t undermine justice. Both procedural justice – which looks at who gets a say in decision making – and distributive justice – which looks at who gets what slice of the pie – need to be a part of the push for resilience.

Decision makers and communities will need to work together to discuss these two questions, whenever “resiliencebuilding” efforts are involved.

Ziervogel is an associate professor in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Science and African Climate and Development Initiative Research chairperson at UCT.

Pasquini is a research co-ordinator, lecturer and senior researcher at the African Climate and Development Initiative at UCT. – The Conversation