Basil van Horen

Developing community-based watershed management in Greater Sao Paulo: the case of Santo Andre

This paper describes how watershed protection is being combined with settlement upgrading and land-use management within an area that serves as one of Greater Sao Paulos main sources of fresh water. This is being undertaken in the municipality of San to Andre. Unlike previous watershed protection measures, which proved ineffective, it recognizes the need to combine the protection of water-sheds with the improvement of conditions in existing settlements and guiding, rather than prohibiting, further settlement. The paper describes how, the community-based watershed management involves the inhabitants of illegal settlements and other stakeholders in an adaptive planning framework that first seeks consensus on what is to be planned before developing the plan, its implementation and its operation, maintenance and monitoring.

Localizing a global discipline - Designing new planning programs in Sri Lanka

In order to be relevant and useful in a fragmented developing country context, community and regional planning needs to shift away from the use of rigid tools to more flexible, adaptive approaches. An international review of planning curricula indicated a widespread consensus with respect to key competencies required of planners. This understanding was used in the development of new teaching programs at three Sri Lankan universities. Complementing the technical core knowledge areas, strong emphases on problem structuring, critical and strategic thinking, and the understanding of the political and institutional contexts appear to be crucial to making the agenda of “planning for sustainable development” more than a fashionable cliché. In order for these core areas to have relevance in a developing country context, however, planning curricula need to achieve a balance between local priorities and a “global” perspective.

City profile - Colombo

Abstract Rooted in a history that dates back 1500 years, the concentration of economic activity and infrastructure in Colombo represents an extreme case of urban primacy within the national context of Sri Lanka. Located on the West Coast of the country, the Colombo metropolitan area accommodates a quarter of the country’s 18.6 million population, and is the economic and political core of the country. However, Colombo is a city of extremes. Its modern and well-serviced core stands in stark contrast to the circumstances of more than half of its population, who live in poorly serviced shack and shanty settlements. The proportion of the population living in these areas continues to expand, notwithstanding a history of innovative and participatory approaches to development planning and management. Complicating these development challenges, the potential of the city is undermined by a civil war that has been under way since the early 1980s, taking an immense toll in loss of life, political polarization, and economic opportunity costs. This paper traces Colombo’s historical development, provides a description of contemporary characteristics and challenges faced by the city, and examines the evolution of plans and programmes designed to improve the conditions of low-income settlements in the city.

‘Policies Are Never Implemented, But Negotiated’: Analyzing Integration of Policies in Managing Water Resources in the Indian Himalayas Using a Bayesian Network

ABSTRACT The paper contributes by analyzing nonlinear and complex integration of policies in framing a water management problem in a case study hamlet in the Indian Himalayas. It reveals that policies are never implemented, but integrated through the negotiation with other policies and socio-cultural settings in (re)shaping water resources management. It demonstrates the incremental and cumulative integration of policies that are formulated from different governance arrangements in (mis)managing water. In such a regime, the paper calls for statutory public actors to lay-out broad principles in their policy statements that allow multiple actors to debate and negotiate diverse alternatives in order to make the policy-making process integrative, adaptive, and dynamic.

Building Institutional Capacity for the Upgrading of Barangay Commonwealth in Metro Manila

Upgrading is among the most effective interventions to address urban poverty, but weaknesses include outdated conceptual frameworks informing project design, and ineffective management by governance institutions. This paper examines the ingredients that need to be put in place during upgrading to ensure the continuity of the settlement improvement process. The paper is divided into three sections. The first section introduces urban upgrading, highlighting both strengths and weaknesses of current approaches. The second section then describes the growth of Barangay Commonwealth in Metro Manila and the characteristics of the settlement. The following section introduces the institutional capacity building framework, outlining the activities necessary to ensure longer-term improvement of low-income settlements. The section then examines physical, environmental, social, economic and institutional dimensions of the upgrading of the settlement that have taken place over the last 15 years. The concluding section examines areas that need attention in order to continue the process of building the institutional capacity that will ensure the longer-term continuity of the improvement of Barangay Commonwealth.