Short Abstract

This panel explores how urban informality and institutions shape climate (im)mobility in African cities, inviting papers that approach this relationship from whichever empirical or conceptual angle speaks to their material.

Long Abstract

Two literatures on African urban climate risk have developed in parallel. One traces how dual customary and statutory land tenure regimes, and the enforcement gaps between them, drive informal settlement expansion and rising impervious surfaces, deepening flood exposure across African cities. The other traces how, even where formal adaptation governance exists, institutions remain fragmented, elite-captured, and reactive rather than anticipatory. This panel is animated by a comparatively simple question: what follows from treating urban informality and constrained (im)mobility as facets of a single institutional context, rather than as separate objects of study? It takes as its point of departure the growing evidence that populations remaining in high-risk zones do so for reasons that resist easy categorisation: place attachment, livelihood dependence, and constrained mobility prospects sit alongside weak land governance, under-resourced early-warning systems, and contested planning authority, without any one factor fully accounting for the others. Rather than presuming what should follow analytically or politically from this entanglement, the panel invites papers that approach the relationship between informality, institutions, and (im)mobility from whichever angle speaks to their material: ethnographic accounts of everyday life in flood- or drought-exposed informal settlements, institutional analyses of early-warning or disaster-risk-reduction systems, studies of contested or failed relocation and resettlement schemes, work on multi-level or transboundary governance gaps, or comparative and conceptual interventions on how African cities are governed under climate risk. The panel is less interested in a single diagnosis than in exposing how unevenly such contexts are experienced, depending on one's position within them.

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