Rights, justice and climate resilience: lessons from fieldwork in urban Southeast Asia

Recent transformative resilience research calls for urban climate interventions that better meet the needs of low-income and other marginalized groups. Such initiatives, it is suggested, must move beyond technocratic and superficial solutions to address the systems and structures that create climate vulnerability. While these are important theoretical developments, there is still much to be learned about how to support transformative resilience on the ground. This paper situates transformative resilience theory in practice with lessons from a five-year research partnership in Southeast Asian cities. We argue that for resilience research to advance rights and justice, knowledge production and mobilization efforts must be conceptualized as active parts of the transformation process. Bringing together conceptual and methodological insights from resilience, political ecology and governance learning research, we offer three pathways for transformative resilience and present examples of how they can be operationalized in Southeast Asia and beyond.

Automated summary

Recent research emphasizes the importance of urban climate interventions that meet the needs of marginalized groups, moving beyond superficial solutions to address underlying systems and structures. To advance rights and justice, knowledge production and mobilization must be considered active parts of the transformation process. By integrating insights from different fields, three pathways for transformative resilience are proposed with examples of operationalization in Southeast Asia and beyond.