Exploring Formal and Informal Water Governance Arrangements in Kavrebangjang, Nepal, 2024

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In these focus group discussions we worked with communities in the hilly Kavrebangjang area of the Kathmandu Valley, exploring their histories and current experiences of water access. We sought to work with different communities that had shared experiences of water access, including social differentiation (by caste) and watershed location (upstream and downstream). Access to the communities was based on existing relationships formed over time by our local partner organisation, and participation was negotiated through community meetings.

Nepal and Thailand offer examples of the rapid urbanisation that is underway across the Global South. Urbanisation is dependent on systems of infrastructure that deliver core services, such as water, energy, and solid waste management. Infrastructure investment and governance decisions thus play a central role in urban inequality, distributing access to services and associated opportunities for human flourishing. As in many places, in Nepal and Thailand significant hope is invested in urbanisation, with growth in urban growth central to a vision of increased economic opportunity and a rebalancing of the economy beyond the capital cities. Yet despite accelerating rates of urbanisation, policy remains limited. The majority of secondary cities have continued to expand in area, with population growth frequently dominated by individuals and households moving into informal settlements where they are marginalised from opportunities, basic services and decision making. Those in informal settlements are also particularly at risk from hazards such as earthquakes, flooding and landslides. The risks from these hazards are routinely understood to reside in particular locations, such as in zones identified to be vulnerable to flooding or in buildings susceptible to earthquake shocks. Yet in urban areas, infrastructure, institutions and political relations create a complex web of connections across scales. It is through disruptions and failures in these underpinning urban systems that hazards are made manifest and the impacts distributed - for example when a landslide in one location disrupts access to clean water in a downstream community. Today, resilience dominates contemporary urban disaster and climate policy initiatives and investments. While the popularity of resilience continues to increase, there are challenges. At a conceptual level, resilience overlooks the significance of power and social relations in determining who is made resilient to what risks. In practice, the focus of urban policy remains on investment to fill the 'infrastructure deficit', overlooking the way in which existing urban systems place different groups of people at risk. As a consequence, the application of resilience to policy and practice in urban settings frequently reproduces or deepens existing patterns of risk, inequality and marginality. In this project, our vision is that urban communities are able to secure their interests in resilience planning and investments, enabling access to services critical to wellbeing in a manner that recognises and responds to the risk of failure in urban systems in the event of natural hazards. To do this we bring together scholars and practitioners in different disciplines from the UK, Nepal and Thailand. We will develop new tools and apply them in Nepal and Thailand to reveal two critical urban phenomena. First, how narratives of risk and resilience can sustain inequality in access to services. And second, how the complexity of urban systems creates risk of failures in service provision with uneven impacts on residents. Our tools will enable those working with marginal communities to identify strategic alliances and entry-points for engagement, opening spaces for dialogue in the city that generate new knowledge and narratives, securing decision making power for marginalised groups and anchoring resilience in the complexity of urban risk creation.