Paper short abstract:

The paper shows how notions of rights, responsibilities and resilience are contested as part of struggles for inclusion and how the capabilities of the urban poor are highly differentiated, and influenced by subjective identities and values as well as material status.

Paper long abstract:

The paper examines social inclusion in new regimes of urban environmental governance that seek to promote resilience to climate change. The paper adds to existing theoretical debates about inclusive cities in two ways. First, it shows how notions of rights, responsibilities and resilience do not just frame modes of inclusion, but are contested as part of struggles for inclusion themselves. Second, it shows how the capabilities of the urban poor to act for individual and collective inclusion in projects to protect against climate risks are highly differentiated, and influenced by the subjective identities and values held by different groups, as well as their material statuses. The paper draws on two strands of empirical work which investigate the politics of inclusion and exclusion in the ladera or hillslopes programme, a landslide risk management programme in Bogota, Colombia. The first is based on fieldwork undertaken in 2009-2010 across a cross-section of households in three landslide risk zones, the second is a more recent investigation of the emergence and influence of Arraigo, a community-based platform for citizens affected by risk-related resettlement programmes in the city. The paper shows how the shifting politics of the state and the socio-political dynamics of communities in the risk zones interact to produce inclusion and exclusion, which also determines household and community resilience to risk. The paper will conclude with reflections for theories of urban governance and environmental change, and for the practices of resilience-building, in particular calls for the multi-stakeholder governance of climate change.