Urbanization coupled with the lack of space has led to soil sealing and encroachment upon stream corridors in many cities the world over. This has caused not just the degradation of the riparian ecosystem, but has also increased the frequency and intensity of flash flooding. India is one of the countries worst affected by urban floods. To manage flood risk, especially in the case of rain-fed urban streams, not just the government but also the public needs to be engaged in the management of the stream corridor. In this context of flood risk management, the resilience concept is increasingly being applied. It revisits some fundamental notions conventionally associated with viewing and managing floods, beginning by acknowledging that floods are natural and unavoidable, and resilience, not stability is the desirable quality. This research aims to study how governance attributes like public participation can enhance flood resilience. To this end, relevant literature on resilience and governance has been studied followed by a study of the events surrounding the flooding of the Ramnadi stream corridor in Pune city through policy analysis, data derived from documents and maps, and through semi-structured interviews with stakeholders like locals, experts, activists and civic authorities. Categorization and meaning interpretation of relevant data has enabled an analysis of the governance structure for the Ramnadi corridor using a causal loop diagram. The nodes, linkages and feedback loops in this diagram have been studied to understand how public participation affects resilience characteristics. Findings of this investigation along with draft recommendations for specific actors were presented to stakeholders in a validation workshop. Implications of the results on the theories of flood resilience, governance and public participation have been examined which has enabled their analytic generalization. General policy recommendations have been based on this. Subsequently, recommendations which promote systems approach based public participation and systems thinking in the governance of social-ecological systems have been made.:Table of Contents i
List of figures iv
List of tables vi
Abbreviations vi
Definitions vii
1 Introduction: Urban Floods, Urban Causes 1
1.1 Urban flood risk in India 3
1.2 Flooding in urban stream corridors 5
1.3 Rationale and aims of the research 8
1.4 Structure of the document 9
2 Theoretical and Conceptual Framework 13
2.1 Flood risk management 15
2.1.1 Towards a systems approach 16
2.2 Social-ecological systems 17
2.2.1 The stream corridor as a social-ecological system 17
2.3 Resilience 22
2.3.1 From ecological resilience to social-ecological resilience 23
2.3.2 Characteristics of resilience 24
2.4 Resilience in the light of other prevalent concepts for flood risk management 29
2.5 Flood Resilience 30
2.5.1 Flood resistance vs flood resilience 31
2.6 Governance 32
2.6.1 Resilience building attributes of governance 33
2.6.2 The Resilience characteristics vs. Governance attributes matrix 36
2.6.3 Special focus: Public participation 37
2.7 Research Questions 44
2.8 Conclusions from the theoretical and conceptual study 45
3 Research design and methods 47
3.1 Overall research design 48
3.1.1 The case study approach 51
3.1.2 Sampling of the case study 54
3.1.3 Boundaries of the case study 56
3.2 Data collection methods 57
3.2.1 Why interviews? 57
3.2.2 Interviewing techniques 58
3.3 Data analysis 61
3.3.1 Coding and Categorization 63
3.3.2 Meaning interpretation: 64
3.3.3 Causal loop diagram 65
3.3.4 Validation of the results and recommendations 66
3.4 Concluding remarks on the adopted research design and methods 67
4 The Ramnadi corridor: A Social-Ecological System 69
4.1 Ramnadi in context 70
4.2 A journey along the Ramnadi 75
4.2.1 Section 1: Ramnadi at the source 77
4.2.2 Section 2: Ramnadi in Bhukum 79
4.2.3 Section 3: Ramnadi between Bhukum and Pune Municipal Corporation limits 84
4.2.4 Section 4: Ramnadi in Bavdhan 87
4.2.5 Section 5: Ramnadi between the Pashan Lake and its confluence with the Mula River 91
4.3 Conclusion after the Ramnadi corridor reconnaissance 93
5 Changes in flood governance and observations from the case study 95
5.1 The history of local governance in India 96
5.2 Institutional framework for urban flood management in India 97
5.3 Flood governance and participation in the stream corridors of PunePune 98
5.3.1 The Ramnadi 98
5.3.2 The Devnadi 103
5.4 Remarks on the changes in flood governance seen in the case study 105
6 Understanding the causal links between governance attributes and flood resilience 107
6.1 The need for a Causal Loop Diagram 108
6.2 Causal Loop Diagram 109
6.2.1 Use of Causal Loop Diagram in this Thesis 109
6.2.2 The importance of identifying archetypes 111
6.2.3 Explanation of the causal loop diagram of governance of the Ramnadi corridor 113
6.2.4 Understanding the implications of change in the governance structure between 2010 and 2016 on flood resilience 141
6.3 The importance of public participation for flood resilience 142
6.3.1 Public participation promotes self-organization 142
6.3.2 Public participation increases the adaptive capacity through promotion of learning 142
6.3.3 Public participation increases robustness 143
6.3.4 Public participation increases redundancy 143
6.3.5 Public participation can increase resilience by boosting other governance attributes 143
6.3.6 Some emerging ideas on complex systems and their implications for public participation 145
6.4 Benefits of systems thinking and of the causal loop diagram for public participation 147
6.5 Conclusions from the causal loop diagram based study 149
7 Towards flood resilience through public participation 151
7.1 Continuous public participation and event-based public participation 153
7.1.1 The need for continuous public participation 154
7.1.2 Disadvantages of continuous public participation 158
7.2 Institutional recommendations for continuous public participation 158
7.2.1 Municipal Corporations and other urban local development bodies 158
7.2.2 Schools: 164
7.2.3 NGOs: 166
7.2.4 Ward Councils: 167
7.3 Conclusion 169
8 Epilogue: Discussion and Avenues for Further Research 171
8.1 Answering the research questions in the course of this research 172
8.2 Key lessons 173
8.3 Theoretical contribution to governance, public participation and resilience 174
8.3.1 Interplay between governance attributes 174
8.3.2 A new paradigm for classification of public participation 175
8.3.3 Systems approach for social-ecological resilience 175
8.4 Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN 176
8.5 Limitations of the research 176
8.6 Avenues for further research 177
9 References 179
10 Appendices 193
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:35621 |
| Date | 09 October 2019 |
| Creators | Gote, Nakul Nitin |
| Contributors | Wende, Wolfgang, Deshkar, Sameer, Technische Universität Dresden |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion, doc-type:doctoralThesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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