Events

This workshop is jointly organised by Pacific Affairs, Canada, and Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.

Flooding is increasingly impacting the lives and livelihoods of urban populations in twenty-first century Asia. The urban transition in Asia has resulted in around 1.5 billion people currently residing in urban areas that account for more than half of the global urban population. Asia will add another billion to its urban population from 2010 to 2040. Asia’s urban turn has been marked by a strong coastal orientation that has left cities and urban residents increasingly exposed to floods, cyclones and tsunamis. From 1970 to 2010, the number of people affected by flooding in Asia has more than doubled from 30 million to 64 million. Heightened flood risk associated with this urban transition has brought water governance issues to the political fore, including the current shortcomings of flood mitigation strategies in policy planning, management and implementation.

This workshop will explore how Asia’s urban populations deal with flooding from a governance perspective. In this, we treat flooding disasters as compound and inter-connected events that generate cascading effects with multiple sources, impacts and long-term recovery issues. This means that extreme weather events that trigger floods that contaminate water supplies in a large urban agglomeration can, and often do, create multiple crises that overwhelm relief and recovery efforts and compromise future coping strategies. It is now widely understood that flooding disasters in cities can produce public health disasters with feedbacks to the economy and social resilience to future disasters. As such, responses to flooding disasters cannot simply be managed by dredging or repairing canals, and must instead include the entire spectrum of urban services, transportation, housing and land-use controls as well as social capacities respond to floods at neighborhood and city region scales. Flooding recovery projects also typically function in an environment fraught with contestations and demands for social justice over land, welfare, livelihoods and urban ecosystems. In cities across Asia, these tensions affect the most vulnerable members of society (for example, people who live in slums and informal settlements) who experience chronically repeated episodes of flooding, with no remedy or policy solution in sight.

Mindful of the compound and inter-connected nature of flooding disasters in Asia, our invited participants adopt multi-sector, multi-disciplinary and multi-stakeholder approaches to governance that will advance scholarship in the search for more effective, comprehensive and inclusive policy choices. All too often a disaster, such as a devastating flood, is viewed as a water management question rather than as an outcome of deteriorating regional ecologies or of land-use patterns that crowd vulnerable populations into flood prone areas. In exploring the interrelationships at work in flooding episodes, we move beyond mainstream approaches to disaster governance that are typically top-down and sector-driven and which can overlook more complex realities such as the influence of personalized power relations in disaster preparedness agendas, recovery programs and development priorities. Through our governance approach to applied disaster research we strive to enhance our understanding of the multi-dimensional causalities of flooding events and how knowledge is linked to action in governing preparedness for, responses to and recovery from floods in Asia’s cities.

CONTACT DETAILS

Workshop Convenors

Dr Michelle MILLER
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
E| arimam@nus.edu.sg

Prof Mike DOUGLASS
Asia Research Institute, and Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore
E| arimike@nus.edu.sg

Secretariat

Miss Sharon ONG
Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
E| arios@nus.edu.sg