Local government,political decentralisation and resilience to natural hazard-associated disasters

Natural hazards affect development and can cause significant and long-term suffering for those affected. Research has shown that sustained long-term disaster preparedness combined with appropriate response and recovery are needed to deliver effective risk reductions. However, as the newly agreed Sendai framework recognises, this knowledge has not been translated into action. This research aims to contribute to our understanding of how to deliver longer term and sustained risk reduction by evaluating the role of political decentralisation in disaster outcomes. Specifically, we investigate whether countries which devolve power to the local level experience reduced numbers of people affected by storms and earthquakes, and have lower economic damage. Using regression analysis and cross-country data from 1950 to 2006, we find that, in relation to both storms and earthquakes, greater transfers of political power to subnational tiers of government reduce hazard impacts on the population. The downside is that more politically decentralised countries, which are usually wealthier countries, can increase the direct economic losses associated with a natural hazard impact after the storm or earthquake than those which are more centralised. However, overall, it seems advantageous to give subnational governments more authority and autonomy in storm and earthquake risk planning.     

Are Environmental Water Advisory Groups an effective form of localism?

A reduction in the legitimacy of top-down governance approaches has resulted in many government agencies using decentralised governance approaches, including localism. However, the effective implementation of localism is challenging. Localism aims to encourage innovative context-based solutions; however unanticipated implementation problems often constrain localism outcomes. There is a significant gap in our understanding of localism in practice, with a better understanding essential to improve localism design and implementation. This paper contributes to addressing this gap through an empirical examination of localism in action. Using the CLEAR framework, we evaluate the decentralised governance of environmental water in the Australian state of New South Wales, a contentious, uncertain and multi-level governance environment. Qualitative interviews with 58 Environmental Water Advisory Group members identified barriers to an effective localism approach, including issues of access and capacity development, transparency of decision-making outcomes and power inequities. This understanding enables the development of strategies for improved localism practice.     

Household self‐blame for disasters: responsibilisation and (un)accountability in decentralised participatory risk governance

The most important theoretical argument concerning decentralised participatory governance is that it can make a government more accountable for the needs of the governed. Key to this process are participatory spaces that act as mechanisms for dialogue between citizens and local government. However, within Cochabamba, a city in the centre of Bolivia, South America, ‘at‐risk’ citizens engage minimally with disaster risk issues in participatory spaces, despite high levels of civic participation. This is because ‘at‐risk’ populations view disasters as a private/household problem that is symptomatic of household error, rather than seeing them as a broader public problem due to wider structural inequalities. Consequently, they redistribute responsibility for disaster risk reduction towards households, which (re)produces the absolution of government authorities as guarantors of disaster risk reduction. This paper challenges the normative assumption that participatory spaces facilitate democratic deliberation of disaster risk reduction and the downward accountability of local government for disaster risk reduction.     

Recentralisation through regionalisation in the implementation of Rural Development Policy in Scotland

In environmental policy, good governance is pertinent when inclusive decision making is recurrently associated with effective outcomes. This paper explores the European Union's good governance principles and the extent to which these have been adopted in the Rural Development Policy in Scotland. For the programme period 2007–2013 Scotland's Rural Priorities scheme has moved towards decentralisation by introducing regional decision-making committees. This study assesses the impact of this scheme on multi-level stakeholder relationships and the implications on policy outcomes. To do so, the study adopts a mixed method approach, applying a stakeholder mapping technique, to quantify perceptions of influence and interest and triangulate with data from in-depth semi-structured interviews. Results indicate that the attempts to widen decision making has resulted in a number of stakeholders perceiving themselves as less empowered. This analytical approach can provide the baseline against which governance improvements can be measured in the formulation of future policies.     

Changing household responses to drought in Tharaka, Kenya: vulnerability, persistence and challenge

Drought is a recurring challenge to the livelihoods of those living in Tharaka District, Kenya, situated in the semi-arid zone to the east of Mount Kenya, from the lowest slopes of the mountain to the banks of the Tana River. This part of Kenya has been marginal to the economic and political life of Kenya from the colonial period until the present day. A study of more than 30 years of change in how people in Tharaka cope with drought reveals resilience in the face of major macro-level transformations, which include privatisation of landownership, population growth, political decentralisation, increased conflict over natural resources, different market conditions, and environmental shifts. However, the study also shows troubling signs of increased use of drought responses that are incompatible with long-term agrarian livelihoods. Government policy needs to address the challenge of drought under these new macro conditions if sustainable human development is to be achieved.     

Informal privatisation of community taps: issues of access and equity

On the basis of a detailed case study this paper questions the equity of centralised piped drinking water supply systems installed by the government of Nepal in rural areas. The study shows how processes of socio-technical interaction and change alter the physical water supply infrastructure of the installed public water supply system, simultaneously altering patterns of access to taps and water. The analysis suggests that this happens through a process of “informal privatisation”, with community taps becoming appropriated by individuals over time, cutting off some families from their access to community tap water while reinforcing the water security of others. This process is deeply shaped by prevailing relations of power and cultural difference along axes of gender, caste and wealth.     

Engaging Economic Development Agencies in Environmental Protection: The case for embedded autonomy

This article examines the role of economic development agencies in strengthening the environmental performance of industry within rapidly industrialising East Asian economies. Three case-study examples are considered, namely, the role of the Industrial Development Board in reducing industrial pollution in Taiwan, pollution control in the palm oil industry in Malaysia, and the role of the Economic Development Board in influencing environmental performance of industry in Singapore. The concept of embedded autonomy is developed to consider the ways in which agencies of economic development can work with firms and industries while simultaneously remaining autonomous from these firms with respect to setting and enforcing performance standards. The three cases suggest that a form of policy integration that more directly integrates economic and environmental goals within agencies of economic development may be feasible, but only where there exists a strong autonomous government bureaucracy and where there is strong societal commitment to improving the environmental performance of industry.     

It takes more than a village: the challenges of co-management in Uganda's fishery and forestry sectors

Decentralisation policies in least developed countries have emerged in response to failed centralised natural resource governance programmes because high-value natural resources are distributed unequally, with central governments often reaping more than local-level users. Current natural resource governance institutions have been created to remedy the problems that central governments formerly posed. Here, we argue that Uganda's forestry and fishery resources are biologically diverse and thus amenable to current decentralised management programmes, provided that there is compromise between market values and local cultural and subsistence values and uses. We observe, however, Uganda's current institutional arrangement favours the former over the latter and determine that successful natural resource decentralisation requires strengthening local-level natural resource institutions with increased fiscal flow, enforcement, monitoring and judicial powers. A strong and reliable partnership between local-level resource users and the central government is necessary for this to occur.     

Climate adaptation in fragmented governance settings: the consequences of reform in public administration

The impact of dominant trends in public administration, such as decentralisation and privatisation on complex collective challenges is insufficiently understood. This is relevant in settings where climate change impacts become manifest at local level, and where financing power resides at national level but decisions are made more locally in a fragmented institutional setting. This study assists in overcoming this gap by analysing how the institutional context (i.e. a decentralised, privatised, fragmented setting) influences the capacity to address climate change challenges in a vulnerable area (the South Devon coast in the UK). There has been little action to address expected climate change impacts in this vulnerable stretch of coast. A lack of clarity around responsibility for addressing climate impacts and a lack of a deliberative structure between various actors involved, within a context of austerity, hamper climate change adaptation. The findings question whether decentralised decision making is sufficient for addressing climate adaptation challenges.     

Injustice and organisation in Anchicayá, Colombia: an environmental legal case in a hydropower watershed

The paper looks at Colombia's first major environmental justice legal case involving a riparian Afro-Colombian community and the Pacific Energy Company (EPSA). Riverine Afro-Colombian communities gained political recognition as a culturally distinct group largely based on their conservation practices in riparian environments. The work contrasts the complexities of the case with the vulnerable reality of the people of Anchicayá who largely live in conditions of poverty, violence and political isolation. It also describes the institutions that frame watershed management, the ethnic rights to collective land and self-governance and the property rights of energy companies in the backdrop of decentralisation reforms that clarified different types of property rights and refounded Colombia as a multicultural nation. The legal suit, however, demonstrates that the government failed to offer equal protection to collective versus private cultural and socio-economic uses of land and water in order to protect energy investments. The Constitutional Court's jurisprudence ultimately privileged technical and legal know-how and overlooked the limits community intermediaries face offering similar evidence. By doing so, the court not only disregarded the constitutional rights of Afro-Colombians, but it also failed to mitigate a socio-environmental conflict.