Future Visioning (FV) is emerging as a critical area for climate adaptation science, policy, and practice. Yet, experiences tend to be led by government institutions or powerful stakeholders, leaving out relevant voices for climate justice. This article highlights the importance of incorporating diverse perspectives in shaping future visions for risk-informed planning and adaptation in cities. The paper examines data from normative FV engagements conducted in four contexts in Tanzania, Palestine, Nepal, and Bangladesh. The analysis reveals various logics used to express place-based injustices and the extent to which these inform visions for resilient future urban environments. By adopting a comparative approach, the research analyses results both within cities - focusing on narratives and scenarios emerging from different social groups - and across cities, exploring emerging global narratives on desired urban development in a context of rapid urbanisation, multi hazard risks and climate change. Our findings highlight the complex nature of visions, which intersect universalistic values with situated experiences and lived injustices. Further research on this topic should explore how intersectional future thinking can drive specific planning trade-offs, as well as its tangible influence on urban planning paradigm shifts and processes amidst rapid urban change.

The decentralization of authority, capability and finance is widely considered to be best practice in urban risk governance. Drawing on the concept of misframing from critical justice theory, we analyse injustices arising from the de jure decentralization of risk governance in Nepal, scrutinizing multi-scalar urban risk governance and its impact on resilient and equitable urban planning. Informed by qualitative research conducted from 2019 to 2024, we ask: How does the (mis)framing of risk governance affect local actors' capacities to manage risks? And to what extent can inclusive, risk-informed urban planning and policy facilitate just decentralization? We identify a disconnect between risk-management responsibilities assigned to local government and its capacity to meet these expectations. Proposing a typology of misframing, we provide recommendations for the design and deployment of more equitable and contextually appropriate financial, technological and administrative decentralization as a pathway to justice that can overcome rigid scalar jurisdictions.

Informal land markets are treated in terms of the processes and practices of transaction, access and ownership that exist outside of or in opposition to the formal mechanisms entailed by state law and regulation. Notwithstanding wider debates in urban studies on the problematic dichotomy of ‘formal’ and ‘informal’, we suggest the place of law and legality in underwriting such institutions and arrangements around land has been undertheorized. This article complicates how the basic categories of state law and regulation on the one hand and non-state norms, rules, customs and practices on the other are used through an examination of an ostensibly informal land market in Maputo, Mozambique. We introduce and apply the socio-legal concepts of scale, jurisdiction and temporality for offering a more complex picture of (in)formality: that while this land market is prohibited at one scale of state law it is simultaneously enabled at another. We find that the state remains surreptitiously involved in this prohibited market by way of local neighbourhood authorities and their informal practices that, officially, have no role in urban land sales, management and administration. Through this move, in turn, we reveal significant accountability implications and questions around the delivery of equitable governance of urban land and communities. As a contribution to the study of informality in urban land governance, we suggest that actors with jurisdiction in this local scale of state law should become seen as subject to the same normative demands for legal accountability as the official institutions of urban land management and administration, and within better systems for public accountability of all actors in the urban land sector.

Equity requires a rethinking of the processes and methods that applied scientists and engineers work through as they develop solutions that are simultaneously technical and social. By bridging insights from science and technology studies with critical analysis of participatory development practice, we propose a framework for understanding equitable technology development. We explore this through an illustrative case of water monitoring technology development, undertaken with scientists, engineers and communities in Vanuatu. Analysis suggests a typology of five methodological considerations that are significant for the practice of equitable technology development, locating equitable technology development as both a technical and an ethical challenge.

A growing body of adaptation literature focuses on community resistance, a phenomenon whereby local people reject external interventions aimed at bolstering adaptation and/or resilience. While this is often considered as "adaptation failure" by development agencies, it may reflect a more complex reality. In this Viewpoint article, we engage an adaptation bricolage lens to examine a set of case studies of externally introduced adaptation in agriculture in Africa. This framework enables us to transcend the binary notion of acceptance vs. resistance and to unpack the complexity and dynamism of adaptation processes. The analysis indicates that externally driven adaptation interventions may yield unpredictable, but often appropriate and sustainable outcomes, when they encounter and engage with local knowledge, experiences, and priorities. Therefore, the design of adaptation policies and programs must take into account the role and context of community agency in shaping local engagement with externally introduced practices and technologies.

Normative future visioning (NFV) offers a critical approach that can respond to the challenges of transformative adaptation. In the context of climate crisis, an understanding of the diversity of desired end-states and pathways for good urban futures is fundamental to fostering cooperation and inspiring purposeful action that can challenge and transform unsustainable processes and behaviours, and researching these processes. This paper contributes to transformative adaptation and climate resilient development by conceptualising NFV as a critical pedagogy. This framing understands NFV as a collective learning experience that can lead to emancipation and transformative action. A novel Encounter–Change Framework is proposed as a general mechanism for evaluating NFV methods. The framework is tested through the Tomorrow’s Cities project across its NFV deployment in nine cities: Quito, Istanbul, Nairobi, Kathmandu, Rapti, Nablus, Dar es Salaam, Cox’s Bazar and Chattogram. General lessons highlight the importance for NFV evaluation of analysing both methodological detail and its positioning within wider policy and planning processes. Detailed empirical findings reveal key lessons and challenges that emerge from practice – related to time, ethics, co-production, diversity, consensus, equity and authorship. These inform both NFV and other participatory experiences that aim at transformation. Policy relevance Transformative adaptation has proven difficult to implement in cities. It promises fundamental changes to socio-technological systems and in so doing raises concerns for future populations and generations, particularly those more vulnerable and equity-deprived. This paper puts forward a framework that offers one way beyond this impasse and supports practices that are future- and transformation-oriented: the Encounter–Change Framework. By drawing on key themes and insights from critical (urban) pedagogies (encounters, connections, emancipation and action and change), a way is proposed to evaluate practical NFV experiences. The Encounter–Change Framework is tested across nine cities. The results emphasise two lines of innovation for policy: a) unpacking the process of NFV from a perspective of power to increase its chances for impact and b) evaluating the positioning of NFV, both in relation to other future approaches and questions and as a part of wider adaptation policy and planning strategies.

Delivering fair, long-term resilience for tomorrow’s cities means acting now to break cycles of risk accumulation. Inclusive future visioning can help by placing the voices and experiences of those at risk at the start of urban policy, planning and project processes, and integrating this with the best science to reimagine what cities and neighborhoods are for, and could be in the long-term.

In an era of rapid urbanisation, understanding how marginalised groups shape and are shaped by planning has never been more urgent. Here, we focus on the political capability of marginalised groups, centring analysis on the control (or lack of control) that they have over their livelihoods and environment. Focused on the politics of participatory planning that surround the Kirtipur and Baan Mankong Housing Projects in Nepal and Thailand, we develop a post-foundational approach to explore how the political capabilities of informal settlers and their representatives are bound up in the realisation of conflict. Crucially, our analysis reveals the discourses, alliances, and expertise – referred to as knowledge infrastructures – that are mobilised by constituted and constituent forms of power to construct and contest urban development. Building upon this framework, we demonstrate how technocratic knowledge infrastructures support hegemonic encroachment discourses that, in turn, condition the emergence of insurgent knowledge infrastructures. In doing so, we show that the political capabilities of informal settlers are fundamentally tied to how these insurgent knowledge infrastructures support participatory planning processes conducive to political subjectivisation. Ultimately, we reveal how participatory planning generates struggles for equality and rights that shape the urban as an arena of conflictual coproduction.

This article responds to the general neglect of legal culture in the study of climate mobilities. It presents a case study of climate mobilities in an unplanned settlement in Maputo, Mozambique, exploring how legal culture influenced residents' decision-making processes as they navigated climate-related risks in their daily lives. We demonstrate that legal culture can facilitate climate mobilities. However, we argue that the role of legal culture in enabling climate mobilities is potentially very complex. Our case study uncovered a nuanced 'ecosystem' of land laws in Mozambique, comprising two official systems - formal and informal. Despite their contradictory substantive content regarding land rights, these systems functioned symbiotically, allowing residents of unplanned settlements to mitigate the effects of climate risks. This apparent paradox is explained through the analytical lenses of jurisdiction, scale and temporality. We also argue that this 'ecosystem' of land laws can only fully be understood within the broader context of Mozambique's political economy, which attracts foreign investment and promotes urban development, often at the expense of those living in unplanned settlements. Future research into the significance of legal culture for climate mobilities must not only be attuned to the plurality of legal orders in play but also consider the scales and temporalities through which they operate. Furthermore, they must also interrogate the interplay between law and broader political, economic and social contexts.

This paper examines the impact of rapid urbanisation on the production of unequal disaster risk in Khokana, peri-urban town in the Kathmandu Valley (KV), Nepal. It brings together scholarships in disaster risk creation and urban political ecology (UPE), asking: (1) what are the roots of Khokana's specific urbanisation trajectory; (2) how is this trajectory altering geographies of hazard risks in Khokana; and (3) how is this risk unevenly distributed between social groups. The data reveal overlapping forms of risk and precarity affecting residents' (long-standing and migrants) everyday lives, in ways that disproportionately impact already-disadvantaged and marginalised groups. These unequal risk geographies are related to the specific forms and processes of urban growth occurring in Khokana, fuelled by three powerful, interconnected pressures: neoliberal capitalist expansion, internal migration, and a strong developmental state. We characterise the resulting form of urbanisation as 'haphazard': a patchwork of planned and unplanned developments, with inadequate attention to hazard risk, livelihood stability and essential services. The paper advances understanding of the place- and historically-specific ways that hazard risk intersects with social, political and economic forces to produce disaster risk in rapidly-urbanising centres. We extend calls for more situated UPE analysis and call for greater, more granular attention to forms of haphazard urbanisation and their uneven risk-producing qualities. We conclude an urgent need to reimagine urban development as a political and economic project, and for future urban planning to pay deliberate and deliberative attention to risk factors, both in KV and in other rapidly urbanising areas of the global South.

While climate change adaptation research has increasingly focused on aspects of culture, a systematic treatment of the role of legal culture in how communities respond to climate risk has yet to be produced. This is despite the fact that law and legal authority are implicated in most, if not all, of the ways in which actors seek to reduce the risks posed to communities by climate change. Using a scoping review methodology, this article examines the intersection of climate change adaptation and legal culture in existing research. Overall, we find that the significance of legal culture for adaptation actions has been under‐explored. Yet, it is also clear that a focus on legal culture holds significant promise for our understanding of climate change adaptation. We set out a research agenda for the field, highlighting the ways in which a focus on legal culture may enrich existing key themes within climate change adaptation research.

Food system resilience has multiple dimensions. We draw on food system and resilience concepts and review resilience framings of different communities. We present four questions to frame food system resilience (Resilience of what? Resilience to what? Resilience from whose perspective? Resilience for how long?) and three approaches to enhancing resilience (robustness, recovery, and reorientation-the three "Rs"). We focus on enhancing resilience of food system outcomes and argue this will require food system actors adapting their activities, noting that activities do not change spontaneously but in response to a change in drivers: an opportunity or a threat. However, operationalizing resilience enhancement involves normative choices and will result in decisions having to be negotiated about trade-offs among food system outcomes for different stakeholders. New approaches to including different food system actors' perceptions and goals are needed to build food systems that are better positioned to address challenges of the future.

CONTEXT:Farmer-led innovation brings farmers together with other stakeholders in a collaborative endeavour that recognises multiple forms of expertise. Critical engagement with mainstream models of agricultural science and technology (AST) development has drawn attention to the isolation of farmers as technology adopters within a compartmentalised model of AST development and dissemination. Academic, government and non-governmental actors and organisations are increasingly supporting facilitated processes in which farmers, scientists and engineers develop new knowledge, learning together about the nature of the problems being faced and the potential of different solution pathways.OBJECTIVE:Despite the centrality of learning to farmer-led innovation, its role has yet to be systematically explored. In response, this paper looks to understand the forms of learning and their contribution to farmer-led innovation during a three-year action-research project involving two groups of farmers from northern England and the Scottish Borders in the UK.METHODS:A researcher-facilitator convened a structured process of twenty meetings that together created opportunities for interaction, deliberation and re-framing of problems and solutions among groups of farmers, a university-based engineer, and wider stakeholders. Multiple qualitative methods were used to build understanding of the different farming contexts and to explore the issues the farmers wanted to work on. Meeting transcripts and fieldnotes were subject to thematic analysis, informed by the analytical framework of cognitive, normative and relational learning derived from the social learning literature.RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS:Cognitive, normative and relational learning were found to be mutually interdependent and equally significant, building iteratively rather than linearly: the farmers and engineer assessed new information and reappraised existing situations; they did so informed by and informing a shift in understanding of their goals for new technology; and in so doing they relied on and developed the trust and confidence needed to acknowledge or challenge each other's perspectives. By orientating the group engagement process around the space to explore and challenge histories and contexts of AST, and by drawing on social learning principles to facilitate interaction between the different expertise of farmers and between farmers and engineers, learning emerged that interleaved technology co-design with incremental refinement of the shared norms and values embedded in the process itself.SIGNIFICANCE:A focus on learning helps deepen understanding of key mechanisms and processes that define and deliver innovation, and the findings suggest that priorities for farmer-led innovation process design should focus on modalities that open up spaces to negotiate both the purpose and products of innovation.

In 2003 the Immigration Appeal Tribunal began issuing guidance cases to lay down authoritatively what is happening in different asylum-seeker producing countries so that asylum decision making would be more consistent. This paper examines whether those guidance cases, Country Guideline cases, are fulfilling this function and whether in a fair and reasonable way.The paper concludes that many of the Country Guideline cases are deeply flawed in a number of key respects:• Lack of proper referencing of the evidence considered, meaning cases cannot be challenged.• Based on incomplete country information, with important and up-to-date evidence either not considered or ignored.• Reasoning is sometimes obscure and it is difficult to fathom how the evidence considered led to the ultimate conclusion.• Parties restrict themselves to submitting evidence and argument on the facts of the particular case. Some guidance cases go beyond these facts and are based on flimsy foundations.• Thorough and definitive country guidance requires resources. These resources have not hitherto been provided by parties to all guideline cases so the Tribunal needs to be more pro-active.• Expert evidence is routinely rejected rather than assimilated into an overall judgment.A fundamental change of approach is required if the IAT is to produce effectively comprehensive guidance which is benign and practical rather than, as at present, inimical to individual justice.

In many parts of the world, traditional institutions are the backbone of village governance and service delivery. While the effects of introducing new institutional arrangements from outside have been widely studied, autonomous changes – that is, those that originate from within communities – are not well understood. Recognising that traditional institutions continuously evolve to remain relevant, we build on critical institutionalism and the concept of institutional bricolage to explain autonomous change processes in traditional institutions. Relying on unstructured storian conversations with community members (20 female, 18 male) from two villages in Vanuatu, our fieldwork explored the emergence of village committees as a governance mechanism to sustain access to vital services. Storian data revealed that a small number of bricoleurs – local agents of change – were driving these autonomous institutional change processes, their agency enabled and constrained by structures within and beyond the community. Bricoleurs created new institutional arrangements to address new governance challenges by borrowing traditional and non-traditional elements and associated meaning, authority and legitimacy. Our analysis reveals the interplay of two established institutional bricolage processes – elite capture and leakage of meaning – each of which operated to open up and close down spaces for change. We draw on agonistic accounts of the political to deepen our understanding of this interaction. By adopting this approach, we reveal the significance of the political at the local level, through which the social plurality of village life is negotiated, resulting in profound shifts in some norms and the maintenance of others. We conclude with reflections on the prospects of unsettling the deep-rooted exclusion from decision making of groups such as women and young people through future autonomous changes in village governance.

Haphazard urban expansion and poorly planned infrastructure development have increased and intensified disaster risks in the geologically fragile Himalaya. Against this backdrop, consolidating and interpreting the findings from four articles included in this special issue on “urbanisation and disaster risk in the Himalaya”, this paper analyses the interrelation between urbanisation and disaster risk in rapidly urbanising areas of Nepal Himalaya. The key findings that we pull together from the papers are: (1) large-scale construction activities, including the real estate boom in peri-urban Nepal, increasingly delink traditional communities from their land and culture; (2) disconnected policies and contradicting implementation in the informal to formal transitions have sustained informality and deepened risk in urban Nepal; (3) institutional inertia sustains poor coordination between stakeholders in relation to knowledge sharing, technology and resources which hinder proactive disaster management at the community level; and (4) operational and knowledge gaps emerge from failures to delineate authority, responsibility and accountability between concerned institutions, and weak institutional capacity between agencies, impeding the adoption of early warning and action system in Nepal. Based on these findings, we conclude that while the political restructuring and decentralisation of the local governments have provided authorities with the legitimacy to devise disaster management policies, enhancing overall institutional capability in terms of access to and mobilisation of knowledge, technologies and resources is needed to reduce disaster risks in the Himalaya.

Social inclusion and poverty alleviation are central to the United Nations (UN) new urban agenda and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially Goal 11 on sustainable cities and communities. In Nepal, the goal of the National Urban Agenda is to “make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, sustainable and smart to enhance their ability to provide decent jobs and adequate housing, infrastructure and services to the ever-growing urban population”. Against this backdrop, many international and national non-governmental organisations and the national federations of informal settlers in Nepal have been advocating for the rights of urban informal settlers to be included in the urban planning processes. In response, the Nepal government has formulated new policies to assess the “authenticity” of informal settlers and accelerate the informal to formal transition process. Drawing from the textual analysis of existing national policies, literature and media publications, in this paper, we document what (dis)connections and contradictions exist in the formal policies and interventions that the national government has designed for addressing urban informality issue and how they frame urban informality issues and the solutions to manage the same. Our analysis shows that although government policies are rhetorically inclusive and progressive, indicating a desire to resolve informality issues, policies issued by different ministries and departments are disconnected. We also find that the practices often contradict the policies, and attempts to secure transitions to formality are undermined by a failure to recognise the legitimate stake that informal settlers have in the process. We conclude by discussing how these contradictions and inconsistencies can potentially be redirected towards socially just urban transition and suggesting ways forward for addressing the protracted urban informality issue in Nepal.

There are increasing calls for transformation to be considered as a means to address the effects of social, cultural and political conditions on vulnerability when resilience is applied in practice. Yet transformation does not necessarily lead to more equitable social conditions. Here, we draw on the analytical framework of political capabilities to reveal aspects of the underlying politics of transformation. Our focus is on the relocation of communities in Tacloban, Philippines following Typhoon Haiyan, as an example of a deliberate transformation enacted as part of an integrated development and disaster risk reduction plan. A household survey, focus group discussions and individual interviews are applied to rank households in terms of their perception of household resilience four years after the disaster. Analysis of the drivers and consequences of differentiation reveals an uneven distribution of resilience among residents, with many facing difficulties despite a focus on livelihoods embedded in the relocation plan. While some were able to leverage pre-existing human and social capital, others found that the shift from coastal livelihoods left them struggling to find a valued role. Relocation reinforced underlying subjectivities with new layers of meaning, reflecting experiences of success and failure in adjusting to a more commercial culture and cash economy. The plan sought improvement through commercial opportunities, reflecting the authority and worldview of dominant city and international stakeholders. While the deliberate transformation that followed sought to be just in the distribution of risk and opportunity, poorer residents lacked the political capability to influence the relocation narrative, which in turn overlooked histories of marginalization and the lived experience of the poor. The case highlights the significance of engaging political capabilities if transformations are to support those in vulnerable communities to make valued life choices. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Demand for animal sourced food is predicted to double in the upcoming 20 years in Sub-Saharan Africa. This is simultaneously a big opportunity in terms of poverty reduction and a significant threat to the environment. The objective of this paper is to present an approach to co-create a set of viable and acceptable development pathways for the livestock sector that maximizes benefits from increased production, exploits the synergies between livestock and the environment, while minimizing the negative effects. It engages local stakeholders and actors into a computer-assisted participatory process, through which local trade-offs and synergies between livestock production, livelihood benefits and environmental impacts can be explored. Scenarios reached by consensus among local stakeholders challenge the dominant discourse of livestock intensification. They suggest that combining extensive and intensive modes enables increased production of animal sourced food with lower additional pressure on the environment than current production modes. The right combination of extensive and intensive production allows for an efficient use of the local biomass and feed resources, and offers opportunities to improve livelihoods for all stakeholders despite their differing economic circumstances, values and traditions.