Inserting Ethics into Deliberation on Adaptation and Resilience Policy

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This follow-up project aims to integrate into adaptation and resilience policy-making some of the lessons gained through the Why We Disagree About Development (WhyDAR) research project (NE/P01609X/1). WhyDAR aimed to identify different ways in which urban resilience is understood while investigating the role of science, technology, ethics and expertise in the making of resilience strategies in the Global South. It drew out key ethical questions arising from disagreement about conceptions to resilience, and asked what an equitable approach to resilience would look like in the face of this disagreement. Aiming to integrate these lessons into real-life adaptation and resilience policy, this project will work together with the climate adaptation team at the municipal level in Cape Town, South Africa (upper middle income). South Africa is likely to experience - and, in some cases, have already experienced - the negative effects of climate change, such as droughts and floodings. Unfortunately, access to resilient infrastructures, including housing, health care, and food chains, and representative institutions is highly unequal, inequitable, and inadequate within South Africa. Consequently, especially the poorest and most vulnerable community members are often left out and underrepresented within resilience and adaptation strategies, threatening their lives, health, food security, livelihoods, well-being, and access to crucial services, such as water and energy supply. This situation raises ethical issues of how adaptation and resilience planning within the most climate vulnerable LMICs can become more equal, equitable, and representative of those who are most in need of inclusion, including taking into account the fact that different stakeholders have different conceptions of and aims for resilience. Working together with the municipal climate adaptation team of Cape Town, the project will develop and implement three procedural methodologies for inserting ethical deliberations into adaptation and resilience planning and policy-making at the local and municipal level: (i) Stakeholder dialogues bring together representatives of different affected groups, including policy-makers, city council members, service providers, NGOs, businesses, and not members of the local communities. Through dialogue, deliberators will be forced to take into account the interests of other groups, explain and provide justification for their own views.(ii) Scenario building exercises will encourage deliberators to reflect on the ethical aspects of different resilience scenarios and how they may be resolved. In particular, we will try out an exercise in which the deliberators will be behind a 'veil of ignorance' when considering a scenario and will not know what identity they have within it. Only afterwards will their identities be revealed to them and they will then evaluate whether the solutions that they came up with behind the veil were really fair to all stakeholders.(iii) Problem-oriented deliberations focus on solving particular, real-life resilience challenges. At different stages during the planning process, the planners will be asked to reflect, with the help of a trained ethicist, on the ethical implications of their plan.The aims of these exercises will be to test different framework for inserting ethics into resilience planning in Cape Town; to draw lessons and best practices from that, which can be scaled up and implemented in similar LMIC contexts; to identify and co-produce knowledge about the ethical aspects of resilience planning; and to build capacity for taking into account ethics when deliberating on resilience within municipal and local institutions. The project will involve researchers at the University of Warwick and the University of Cape Town in collaboration with the City Climate Adaptation Team of Cape Town and the non-governmental organizations Practical Action and Christian Aid.