Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

229 Beyond these explicit references, many of the city’s adaptation goals are strategically bundled with the city’s broader development goals (Aggarwal 2013). For example, when describing the urgency of acting to address climate change, the introduction to the climate change agenda reads, in part: “This means putting in place small efforts which are encapsulated in a framework which makes it possible for each Delhiite to become a part of the process of change. This document sets forth the ways in which Delhi’s Development Agenda can be marshaled to meet the objective of preserving our planet” (GNCTD 2009). The aim then seems to be to develop a program that builds on existing development aims. However, the plan does not contain specific strategies by which Delhi’s development agenda will be leveraged for climate change benefits, and although there are many components of Delhi’s development agenda that target the needs of vulnerable groups, as a whole it does not prioritize the needs of these groups (Ghertner 2010). According to an NGO representative in Delhi: “Currently they are planning for the middle class but climate change requires that they plan for the most poor, the people who are vulnerable. The people who they are planning for, they are more resilient. They are not vulnerable. The communities, the poor communities, are the people who are more vulnerable. But there’s no plan that says each person should have access to a minimum number of liters (of water)” (NGO representative in Delhi, 2 May 2012, personal communication). An important improvement in the forthcoming state action plan is the use of a vulnerability assessment, as recommended in the common framework. The city has commissioned academics from the Indian Institute of Technology to conduct quantitative vulnerability assessments for the city based on potential climate impacts. In theory, the use of a vulnerability assessment should help the city identify and target vulnerable groups. However, it is still not clear how the vulnerability assessment will be conducted and the extent to which it will be used in setting adaptation priorities. Meeting justice criterion 2 requires that the outputs and outcomes of the policy process recognize and prioritize the adaptation needs of the vulnerable groups in the city. Although vulnerable groups are mentioned in the climate change agenda, particularly in reference to the provision of sewage connections in all villages and unauthorized colonies, the needs of vulnerable groups in Delhi extend well beyond sewage connections. In addition, the climate change agenda is explicitly linked to the broader development goals of Delhi’s development agenda, a program that has been criticized for prioritizing the middle class. For these reasons, climate change adaptation planning in Delhi does not meet the second justice criterion. Justice criterion 3: outcomes and impacts of adaptation enhance the freedoms and assets of vulnerable groups in the city Evaluating the outcomes and impacts of the climate change agenda is challenging for at least two reasons. First, the outcomes and impacts of the climate change agenda are in many ways conflated with the outcomes and impacts of existing programs in the city, such as Delhi’s development agenda and the tree planting program of the Parks and Gardens Society, as well as national programs, such as Mission for a Green India and the National Solar Initiative, that have been explicit motivators of some of the targets in the Climate Change Agenda for Delhi 2009-2012. For example, Delhi’s tree planting program has successfully partnered with RWAs to revitalize parks and green spaces throughout the city (Parks and Gardens Society, 9 May 2012, personal communication). However, the conflation among the climate change agenda, the existing tree planting program of the Parks and Gardens Society, and the national Mission for a Green India makes it difficult to attribute the success of tree planting efforts to the climate change agenda itself. Second, the city itself has not systematically tracked progress in meeting the goals of the climate change agenda, and many key individuals who were involved with the agenda are now working in very different parts of the government or in the central government. The tracking that has been done largely focused on documenting the introduction of city-level policy measures that are aligned with the six national missions addressed in the climate change agenda, e.g., solar tariffs and mandatory use of CFL light bulbs. Detailed information about where and to what extent these measures have been implemented is not publicly available. Although attributing outcomes and impacts directly to the climate change agenda is challenging, there is little indirect evidence that the freedoms and assets of vulnerable groups have been enhanced by this program or by the development agenda. Forty-five percent of the city remains unconnected to the sewer network, and 25% of the city is not connected to the water supply network (senior official at the Delhi Jal Board, 25 May 2012, personal communication). There are ongoing conflicts between the city’s river restoration goals, included in the climate change agenda and the development plan, and informal settlements: technically the city is not allowed to relocate people for the purpose of restoration (Delhi Development Authority, 24 May 2012, personal communication), but in some cases court rulings prioritizing Delhi’s efforts to become a world-class city have led to the destruction of homes for the purpose of riverbank restoration (Bhan 2009), whereas other projects, such as the Akshardham Temple, have been allowed to take place on the floodplain (Ghertner 2010). The broader environmental agenda has not been conducive to meeting the needs of the most disadvantaged in the city either. Some actions against the interests of the poor and informal in Delhi are the result of public interest litigation brought to the courts by environmentalists, leading to the claim that “bourgeois environmentalism has emerged as an organized force in Delhi” (Baviskar 2003:90). The perceptions of intervieweesmirror these findings. One NGO representative says, “in terms of action...there’s nothing unconventional or new being done from the climate change point of view, not much at all” (NGO representative, 2 May 2012, personal communication). There were no accountability mechanisms in place to ensure that the various departments were implementing their assigned actions. According to a former city government employee, although the departments were asked to report what they were doing, they were