Dina Abbott

A review of slum housing policies in Mumbai

Mumbai (Bombay) is Indias main industrial and commercial centre. According to the United Nations it is the seventh largest city in the world with the fifth fastest rate of population growth. Over half the population, however, live in conditions of abject poverty, crammed into overcrowded slums and hutments located in unhealthy marginal environments. There are many complex reasons for Mumbais housing crisis, including strong population in-migration and growth. Former urban development policies favoured capital-intensive industries and the rapid growth of a low-wage informal sector. Subsidised transport systems allowed poor people to live and work in the city. Mumbais poor housing is also a reflection of a poor and inappropriate urban planning system, a lack of public investment and restrictions in the land and rental housing market. The failure of the city authorities to cope with the urban poor is highlighted by a review of the main housing policies implemented in the city. These range from slum clearance and the construction of high-rise apartment blocks to a range of self-help strategies and current privatised market-led schemes. Trapped between dwindling public investment and new powerful market-led forces, it is contended that the future of housing the poor in Mumbai looks bleak.

Climate change: lived experience, policy and public action

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the importance of lived experiences, as complementary knowledge to that provided by the sciences, for policy and intervention on climate change. Design/methodology/approach – This conceptual paper draws on several strands within the context of climate change: knowledge and power; human engagement; the meaning of “lived experience” (and its association with “local/indigenous knowledge”); its capture through interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary inquiry; post-normal science; rationalist and public action approaches to policy and intervention. The paper combines these strands from their different literatures, previous work by the authors and interdisciplinary deliberation in a European climate change education project. Findings – The case is made for taking account of lived experiences in climate change policy and intervention, and the dangers of not doing so. The paper, however, also identifies the challenge of establishing the validity of lived experience...

Dimensions of professional competences for interventions towards sustainability

This paper investigates sustainability competences through the eyes of professional practitioners in the field of sustainability and presents empirical data that have been created using an action research approach. The design of the study consists of two workshops, in which professional practitioners in interaction with each other and the facilitators are invited to explore and reflect on the specific knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviours necessary to conduct change processes successfully towards sustainability in a variety of business and professional contexts. The research focuses on the competences associated with these change processes to devise, propose and conduct appropriate interventions that address sustainability issues. Labelled ‘intervention competence’, this ability comprises an interlocking set of knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviours that include: appreciating the importance of (trying to) reaching decisions or interventions; being able to learn from lived experience of practice and to connect such learning to one’s own scientific knowledge; being able to engage in political-strategic thinking, deliberations and actions, related to different perspectives; the ability for showing goal-oriented, adequate action; adopting and communicating ethical practices during the intervention process; being able to cope with the degree of complexity, and finally being able to translate stakeholder diversity into collectively produced interventions (actions) towards sustainability. Moreover, this competence has to be practised in contexts of competing values, non-technical interests and power relations. The article concludes with recommendations for future research and practice.

Exploring the Lived Experience of Climate Change

This chapter extends the conceptual and theoretical arguments presented in Chap. 1. It introduces lived experience as a rich and complex narrative, set within societal structures which constrain and/or enable individuals to make sense of climate change. In questioning ‘whose knowledge counts’ from this vantage point of view, we suggest that lived experiences of climate change provide insights and knowledge that go beyond scientific or academically presented knowledge. This experiential knowledge evolves through historical processes and is shaped through a variety of social contexts, both general and specific, between groups (Northern, Southern, rich, poor) and individuals (often defined by race, gender). It is also shaped by our personal and collective positioning in society and the scale of events that affect us. The valuable insights and the diversity can only add to existing knowledge of climate change and influence policy and practice in an inclusive way. In this, the chapter focuses on lived experiences in developing countries, the large majority of whose populations are poor and where climate change issues are linked to and subsumed within embedded poverty.

The Lived Experience of Climate Change

This paper explores the concept of ‘lived experience of limate change’, the complementary challenge it poses to scientific (natural and social science) knowledge, its potential to inform policy, and the methodological challenges of capturing it. We conceptualise lived experience of climate change as evolving knowledge gained over time by individuals and groups through their everyday practices, practices that are in turn framed by proximate impacts of climate-related processes and events, and by broader socio-economic circumstance. The potential of lived experience to complement the sciences and inform policy poses difficult epistemological questions regarding how climate change knowledge is constructed and used. A key further dimension concerns the challenges that confront those who seek to capture it and its integrated, multi-faceted dimensions.

Lived Experience and Engagement on Climate Change

Within the dominant overarching ‘threat and war’ frame of climate change are nested many specific frames. One of these concerns the public will to know and act on climate change which, itself’ has three broad problem dimensions that both overlap with each other and are partly oppositional. First, there is a perceived problem of communication of climate science which in earlier formulations could be addressed through more effective, targeted dissemination. More recently, however, it has been argued that deliberative processes of engagement between scientific and lay actors are required. Second, there is the nature of multiple perspectives that lead to disagreement on climate change and the question of how such disagreement may be put to the productive use. Third, is the resistance to engaging with disturbing information, except in an abstract way, through social norms of attention that shape what we think and talk about, and which lead to socially organised denial of climate change. Social norms of attention may be seen as placing limiting epistemological boundaries around lived experiences and hence a challenge for the fundamental argument of this book that views them as a positive resource.

Rationalist and Public Action Theories of Knowledge in Climate Change Debates

Whatever our uncertainty about climate change knowledge, what matters is how we respond to this and what action we take. Devising appropriate action for policy for climate change generates much debate and disagreement. This chapter discusses differing approaches to policy making for climate change, beginning with dominant rationalist, mostly linear, approaches. It suggests that both scientific positive and normative assertions that are embedded in a rationalist approach are also reflected and reinforced through discussions, often heated, on action and policy making. However, prescriptive linear policy ‘from above’, surfacing from a ‘nanny state’, is often resented by the public. Policy also needs public support which determines how far governments can enforce it when there are several tensions around finding common ground, conflicts over resource priorities and ethical and moral issues of social justice and equity. Also, individual rationalisation based on personal perceptions and lived experience can be more powerful, overriding, challenging and cancelling rationalist contention. Altogether, such considerations generate several problems for a linear rationalist approach. For these reasons, a preferred alternative is a non-linear public action approach which arguably has a better, wider fit with how policy is actually made. In this approach, policy at all scales is a perpetual social process of being made and remade, rather than shaped through an expert-led prescription. It recognises that robust policy and intervention is constructed from the engagement of both scientific knowledge and lived experiential knowledge. There are, however, real issues of power at play in such engagement, concerning whose knowledge counts, and the political use of contested knowledge to cancel evidence claims. Nevertheless, despite the challenges, difference and diversity are sources of social learning and new knowledge. As Chap. 8 has argued, we require a productive transboundary engagement and social imagination to expand knowledge boundaries. We don’t learn by being the same.

Introduction: A Wealth of Lived Experience

We need to understand better the societal responses to the idea and reality of climate change. Analysis of lived experiences enables us to embark on that task. Lived experiences, however, even when we try to make sense of them as collective experiences, are extremely diverse. This chapter describes and analyses the experiences of flood victims in affluent countries, vulnerable forest communities in two poor countries, opposition to mitigation attempts, and two environmental activists. From these it creates a conceptualisation that is based on the interplay of broad contextual influences, proximate influences resulting from climate-related events, and the human capacity to reflect and learn from action and engagement with one another. It ends by providing three building blocks for the book as a whole: the conceptualisation that it has generated, the comparison with dominant scientific accounts of climate change, and the challenge of public engagement, action and policy for intervention.

Institutionalising Lived Experience in the Public Policy Process

Reasons for institutionalising lived experience in public policy processes on climate change vary, depending on whom one asks. Government, the private sector, scientists, engineers and civil society each have different, albeit sometimes complementary and sometimes overlapping, reasons. We, the authors of this book, also have reasons, namely that institutionalisation of lived experience within the policy process: Exposes the politics and power relations at play in public policy making to those whose lived experiences are being institutionalised. Generates a space for joint learning and broader, deeper knowledge alongside the inputs from science Exposes the dominant frames within which climate change debates are constructed Provides a peg for voicing other pressing social issues that could lead to a polycentric framing We also argue that through our institutionalised engagement with one another we come to appreciate our human and human–nature interdependence and the potential to develop a transboundary, social imagination among citizens and scientists alike. Institutionalisation, however, raises many issues. These range from basic human attributes of just how much knowledge we may hold and tell to establishing the basic conditions for productive engagement and managing enduring power relations between actors and their sources of power. The chapter ends by examining three potential ways in which we might institutionalise lived experience in public policy making on climate change: Government monitoring of the social media sites that exist on the topic Government-organised focus groups and interviews Independent environmental action groups as have been established in Southern Africa by an NGO acting as a boundary organisation to bring civil society, scientists, the private sector and governmental actors together.

Lived Experience and Discourses of Mitigation, Adaptation

Mitigation of, and adaptation to, climate change have been major themes of United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) periodic reports since their inception. A review of the 2007 and 2014 reports, however, finds that the IPCC coverage of mitigation and adaptation, while increasingly extensive and drawing on both the social and natural sciences, restricts itself largely to a discourse that is driven by the physical phenomenon of climate change. There is no discussion, for example, of how the lifestyle and behavioural changes that it advocates in these reports may be achieved, and no substantive related discussion of the difficult political processes that inevitably underlie all intervention and which are crucial for their popular legitimacy. A lived experience lens inherently draws attention to these issues and to the current dominant underlying framing of climate change as a threat that requires a war and sacrifice in the present for future prosperity.