WATERSHED: Climate justice, vulnerability, and informal urban adaptation in Kenya

project summary

WATERSHED explores the tension that exists between policies, interventions, and government actions that increase urban climate vulnerability and the everyday climate justice actions of community activists in informal urban communities. These tensions are important to study as we are witness to intensified climate disasters, explosive urban growth, and an ongoing global shift in development funding. In such a context, ordinary people’s everyday actions are often overlooked for being too granular and inconsequential in comparison to the scale of the climate change vulnerability that the world faces. However, this project proposes that how local adaptation and climate activism can also contribute to climate change governance and decision-making amidst these global transitions. Empirically, the project will document how climate vulnerability in the form of floodings intersects with other historical vulnerabilities in three densely populated informal urban settlements – namely Mathare, Korogocho and Pumwami – along the rivers in Nairobi. These communities are front-runners in community-led climate change efforts. Their climate actions include public protests, river clean-ups, surveying riverbanks, creating green spaces, awareness campaigns, community parliaments, bottom-up mappings and documentation of climate incidents. WATERSHED proposes that understanding the impact of these climate actions can contribute to more inclusive climate adaptation governance and decision-making processes. The overall research objective of the project is to theorize the interlinkage between vulnerabilities, climate justice activism and adaptation efforts led by community actors. The developmental objective is to enhance the basis for formulating just climate change related governance and decision-making processes for informal urban residents. The policy objective of this project is to produce knowledge on climate hazards and structural vulnerabilities in informal urban settlements for evidence-based policy recommendations, and to include community actors in the production of knowledge on their own communities.