Overview of key project concepts and relationships around peri-urban, climate change, adaption, vulnerability and water security - Dr. Vishal Narain, MDI

1. Periurban water security and
adaptation
A review of concepts and
relationships

2. Objectives of this presentation
• Develop a shared glossary of this project
• A common understanding of terms and
concepts used in the proposal/general
• Move towards some conceptual
framework
• Use this to structure our research/lead our
research questions in the respective
locations

3. Terms and concepts key to this
study
• Periurban
– Defining periurban
– Should we define it in terms of its geographical
connotations or in terms of certain features
• Vulnerability
– Risk
– Exposure
– Adaptation
– Coping capacity and resilience

4. Key terms and concepts
• Institutions
– As distinguished from organizations
– Land tenure and tenure security
– Social capital
• Water security
• Technology
• Ecological foot-print

5. Periurban
• Confusing term with no consensus regarding its
meaning
• Used to denote a place
– Fringe areas around cities
– Rural areas, but also urban areas away from the core
• Process
– Transition from rural to urban
• Concept/analytic construct
– To study rural-urban relationships

6. Counterparts of periurban in other
languages
• Dutch
– halfstedig (semi-urban)
• East Asia
– 'desakota‘ (city village)
• German
– urban landlichen zonen (urban rural zones)
• Afrikaans
– buitestedelik (outer city or beyond the city)

7. What defines periurban
• Place-based definitions problematic
– Definition of urban and rural vary from country to
country
– Towns and villages often get reclassified frequently
• Look for certain features:
– Changing land use
– Multiple claimants
– Social heterogeneity
– Livelihoods across both urban and rural spaces
– Changing locus of control over natural resources

8. Locating a ‘periurbanscape’
• A mixed patchwork of contrasting land
uses
– Agricultural fields, farm-houses, amusement
parks, brick kilns, mining and quarrying, high
rise buildings

9. Vulnerability
• used to describe people and organizations
that are negatively affected, directly or
indirectly, by a single process or event (O’
Brien at al., 2009).
• captures the changing nature of risks and
variable capacity to cope with both risk
and change (Kirby 1996)

10. Vulnerability
• concept used to draw attention to
– the specific contextual factors that influence
exposure
– capacity to respond to change
– in order to explain how and why some groups and
individuals experience negative outbreaks from
shocks and stressors (Leichenko and O’Brien 2002).
• The key to understanding vulnerability is to
identify where and how different stressors
interact
– that vulnerability can be used to draw attention to the
effects of multiple stressors on people's well-being
and livelihoods (de Waal, 2006).

11. Relevance of the concept
• Within both research and practitioner
communities, vulnerability reduction is
increasingly recognized as necessary for
improving human well-being and human security
in the face of multiple shocks (O’Brien et al.,
2009).
• Reducing the vulnerability of the most vulnerable
households involved in agriculture and
elsewhere in the developing world requires
complementary measures to safeguard natural
resources to promote market access and to
augment human capital.

12. For our research
• We use the concept as an entry point to
see how multiple stressors interact
• Recognize vulnerability as a chronic
phenomenon and not just in the context of
extreme events
• Identify elements of
risk/hazard/exposure/coping
capacity/resilience
– During our scoping study make first attempt ?

13. Adaptation
• an adjustment in natural or human
systems in response to actual or expected
climate stimuli or their effects, which
moderate harm or exploit benefit
opportunities.
– IPCC (2007)
– We see adaptation as shaped by a mix of
technologies and institutions

14. Coping capacity
• Coping capacity can be defied as a
combination of all strengths and resources
available within a community or
organization that can reduce the level of
risk or the effects of a disaster (UNRISD
2002).

15. • Hazard is understood as a potentially
damaging physical event, phenomenon
and/or human activity, which may cause
the loss of life or injury, property damage,
social and economic dispruption or
environmental degradation (UNRISD
2002).

16. Risk
• The term risk encompasses the probability and
the amount of harmful consequences or
expected losses resulting from interactions
between natural or human induced hazards and
vulnerable conditions (UNISDR 2002).
• The relevance of hazards and risks will vary
across our research locations, depending on the
likely impacts of extreme events like floods,
droughts, glacial outbursts and others.

17. What are institutions ?
• Institutions: regularized patterns of interaction
through which the society organizes itself
• Regularized patterns of social interaction
• Sets of norms, rules and conventions
• Law
– Property rights
– Social relationships
– Written/unwritten
– Explicit/implicit

18. What are organizations ?
• Organizations
• Bodies of individuals with a specified
common objective
– Political organizations
– Economic organizations
– Social organizations
– Religious organizations

19. Social capital
• attempts to describe features of populations
such as levels of civic participation, social
networks and trust
• shape the quality and quantity of social
interactions and the social institutions that
underpin society (Mackenzie and Harpham
2006).
• An individual's social relationships allow
differential access to resources and these
relationships define social capital (Bourdieu
1986)

20. The components of social capital
• community networks, voluntary, state, personal
networks and density
• civic engagement, participation and use of civic
networks
• local civic identity, sense of belonging, solidarity
and equality with local commnuity members
• reciprocity and norms of cooperation, a sense of
obligation to help others and confidence in
return of assistance
• trust in the community.
– Putnam (1993)

21. Land tenure
• the relationship, whether legally or customarily
defined, among people, as individuals or groups,
with respect to land and associated natural
resources, including water, trees, minerals and
wildlife (Clover and Eriksen 2008).
• the terms and conditions on which land is held,
used and transacted, determining who can use
land resources for how long and under what
conditions.
– basic to understanding water security in periurban
contexts

22. Water Security
• Water insecurity
– a condition of uncertainty in the availability of water.
– we conceptualize water (in)security as being shaped
by the parallel processes of urbanization and climate
change
• Dictionary meaning of secure
– ‘safe, reliable, stable, fixed’. ‘Security’, then, is a
‘secure condition or feeling’.
–

23. Technology
• ‘knowledge or use of mechanical arts and
sciences; these subjects collectively.’
• denote physical artifacts through which
water users access water
– embodiment of certain types of knowledge
– not socially neutral

24. Technology….
• Tubewells, pump-sets, sprinklers, hand-
pumps, submersibles,
• Spouts, step-wells, manually operated
pulleys
• How do they shape access to water and
how do users adapt to water insecurity
through different technologies ?

25. Ecological foot-print
• Measure of the consumption of resources,
or of the demands on the eco-system
• Provides us a tool to study rural-urban
relationships
• How is the ecological foot-print of cities
borne by the periurban locations in terms
of the demands for land and water ?