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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how urgency is handled and politicised in official and community level responses to increased flooding at the Chad-Cameroon borderland. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in towns towns, it explores the spatialities and temporalities of preparedness in times of climate change.

Paper long abstract

Seasonal floods in the Chad–Cameroon river borderland have intensified in recent years, repeatedly destroying homes, livelihoods and key infrastructure (OCHA 2022; 2025) and producing pendular mobilities that unsettle long standing social and territorial arrangements (Maazaz 2025). Municipal and state officials invoke scarce resources and administrative constraints to justify widespread institutional inertias despite genuine duty commitments, akin to other contexts in the Global South (Hendriks 2024). Meanwhile, various cross-border communities such as the Mosgoum people articulate their own discursive and practical responses to navigate the recurring devastations of excess waters, thereby mobilizing kinship networks, popular economies, and improvised forms of collective preparedness.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in twin towns along the border, this paper examines how urgency is articulated and embodied in both top-down and bottom-up responses to climate related disasters, foremost among them flash floods. Engaging with debates around the “hidden transcripts of resilience,” (Grove 2013), it explores how competing claims of urgency shape the temporalities of preparedness, ethical regimes and forms of participation and exclusion that emerge in the wake of repeated flooding.

By tracing how flash floods expose and deepen inequalities in land access, social and political capital, the paper shows how urgency is manipulated to rework local relations between state and municipal actors, NGOs, and affected communities. Ultimately, it argues that the politics of urgency in flood prone context illuminates broader dynamics of climate governance in the Global South, where crisis narratives, resource scarcity, and moral claims intersect to shape the possibilities and limits of collective resilience.