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AbstractIn evolving democracies, top-down approaches to response and recovery in disaster governance remain predominant. Taking the case of Nepal, this research explains how Nepal's disaster governance has been accentuating different degrees of monocentric and polycentric configurations post-2015. Polycentricity is defined as a governance configuration where a combination of small, medium, and large-scale autonomous units coexists that are interdependent in making rules, developing policies, and implementing them within a specified scale of governance. Based on confidential interviews (n = 23) and policy documents (n = 48) analysis, the study shows how disaster governance has been taking shape in Nepal, after the 2015 earthquake and with the ongoing federalisation process. This research found that in Nepal, there is a polycentric configuration at and across the national and provincial levels, whilst higher degrees of monocentric characteristics are still prominent at the municipal level. Further, our findings suggest subtle conflicts (or conflicts of interest) between the newly elected municipal representatives and the existing bureaucracy. Such tensions have arisen due to the drive and enthusiasm of the political leaders to bring transformative changes at the municipal level in quick succession. The article concludes that polycentric governance configurations in Nepal are rather becoming complex—complementing and inciting competition between various actors.

Since the early work on defining and analyzing resilience in domains such as engineering, ecology and psychology, the concept has gained significant traction in many fields of research and practice. It has also become a very powerful justification for various policy goals in the water sector, evident in terms like flood resilience, river resilience, and water resilience. At the same time, a substantial body of literature has developed that questions the resilience concept's systems ontology, natural science roots and alleged conservatism, and criticizes resilience thinking for not addressing power issues. In this study, we review these critiques with the aim to develop a framework for power‐sensitive resilience analysis. We build on the three faces of power to conceptualize the power to define resilience. We structure our discussion of the relevant literature into five questions that need to be reflected upon when applying the resilience concept to social–hydrological systems. These questions address: (a) resilience of what, (b) resilience at what scale, (c) resilience to what, (d) resilience for what purpose, and (e) resilience for whom; and the implications of the political choices involved in defining these parameters for resilience building or analysis. Explicitly considering these questions enables making political choices explicit in order to support negotiation or contestation on how resilience is defined and used.

To address the impacts of climate change, countries in South Asia are increasingly making efforts to design climate change adaptation (CCA) policies. Such policies are prepared in a complex power-loaded environment, where different policy actors struggle with one another to meet their personal or collective interests. Current CCA policy research highlights the importance of power in policy-making, but few studies have looked into this systematically. This dissertation therefore aims to study the role of power in CCA policy-making in South Asia and to recommend ways to deal with the negative effects of power. The research adopts an abductive research design, using qualitative case studies in Nepal, India and Bangladesh. Case studies at local, national and transboundary level are conducted to study how actors' power interplay influences CCA policy-making processes and policies. This dissertation proposes a power interplay framework that describes interactions between policy actors and how actors deploy material and ideational resources to influence one another. It presents evidence of how policy actors use these resources at local and regional level to exclude local policy actors and push for short-termism in local adaptation plans and in the planning process for the transboundary Brahmaputra River basin. It shows that multiple climate policy paradigms shape the way in which adaptation is framed and approached by policy actors and that these paradigms have an important influence on how power interplay evolves. To reduce the negative effects of power – for example, the exclusion of actors – I distilled four power-sensitive design principles (PDPs) from other social science disciplines for application in the CCA context. The results of this dissertation offer theoretical contributions to the study of CCA policy-making in South Asia, and concrete and practically relevant PDPs are proposed to improve long-term CCA planning.

Countries sharing the Brahmaputra River have for decades deliberated on formulating and implementing cooperative strategies to develop the potential of the basin. Yet, little progress has been made so far at the government-togovernment track 1 level in achieving regional cooperation due to the diverse national interests of the riparian countries. This has led to tension and friction among co-riparian nations and mistrust at political level. Drawing from the Brahmaputra Dialogue, this paper aims to highlight the merit of multi-track and multilateral dialogue processes for building trust and confidence between the riparian countries - paving a way towards transboundary cooperation. The paper concludes that given the geo-politics and the national interests of each riparian nation, negotiation for a treaty for cooperation through track 1 diplomacy, in the Brahmaputra River Basin (BRB), is a non-starter. Multi-track and multilateral dialogues can provide a platform to pursue positive interactions and can be viewed as an extension to existing state-diplomacy in BRB, to bring about sustainable change in the basin management.

The waterscape is a perspective that has captured the imagination of diverse scholars interested in the interaction of water and society. This includes the way water travels in time and space and is shaped by culture and geography. In this article, we pay particular attention to the study of the waterscape in the political ecology tradition. Scholars following this tradition have placed strong emphasis on understanding the role of power and the contested nature of water in diverse rural, urban, and periurban landscapes. The article provides a brief account of the main strands of literature and serves the purpose of an introductory overview of the waterscape for beginners. We focus both on major works that have helped define the waterscape as a perspective in political ecology and recent studies on the role of unequal power and gender relationships, informal water practices, and local water flows such as ponds and wastewater. ; QC 20181217

South Asia is a region uniquely vulnerable to climate-related impacts. Climate change adaptation in India and Bangladesh evolves using powering and puzzling approaches by policy actors. We seek to answer the question: how do powering and puzzling approaches influence the climate change adaptation policy design and implementation processes in Bangladesh and India? We adopted two strategies to collect and analyze data: semi-structured interviews and discourse analysis. We found that adaptation policymaking is largely top-down, amenable to techno-managerial solutions, and not inclusive of marginalized actors. In Bangladesh, power interplays among ministerial agencies impair the policy implementation process and undermine the success of puzzling. Local-scale agencies do not have enough authority or power to influence the overall implementation processes occurring at higher scales of governance. The powering of different actors in Bangladesh is visible through a duality of mandates and a lack of integration of climate adaptation strategies in different government ministries. The powering aspect of India's various adaptation policies is the lack of collective puzzling around the question of differentiated vulnerability by axes of social difference. Paradoxically, India has a puzzling approach of hiding behind the poor in international negotiations. Moving forward, both countries should strive to have more inclusive and equitable adaptation policymaking processes that enable the participation of marginalized populations and represent their anxieties and aspirations. Identifying policy-relevant insights from South Asia using the powering and puzzling approaches can foster adaptation policy processes that facilitate empowerment, the missing piece of the adaptation policymaking puzzle.

South Asia is a region uniquely vulnerable to climate-related impacts. Climate change adaptation in India and Bangladesh evolves using powering and puzzling approaches by policy actors. We seek to answer the question: how do powering and puzzling approaches influence the climate change adaptation policy design and implementation processes in Bangladesh and India? We adopted two strategies to collect and analyze data: semi-structured interviews and discourse analysis. We found that adaptation policymaking is largely top-down, amenable to techno-managerial solutions, and not inclusive of marginalized actors. In Bangladesh, power interplays among ministerial agencies impair the policy implementation process and undermine the success of puzzling. Local-scale agencies do not have enough authority or power to influence the overall implementation processes occurring at higher scales of governance. The powering of different actors in Bangladesh is visible through a duality of mandates and a lack of integration of climate adaptation strategies in different government ministries. The powering aspect of India's various adaptation policies is the lack of collective puzzling around the question of differentiated vulnerability by axes of social difference. Paradoxically, India has a puzzling approach of hiding behind the poor in international negotiations. Moving forward, both countries should strive to have more inclusive and equitable adaptation policymaking processes that enable the participation of marginalized populations and represent their anxieties and aspirations. Identifying policy-relevant insights from South Asia using the powering and puzzling approaches can foster adaptation policy processes that facilitate empowerment, the missing piece of the adaptation policymaking puzzle.

The aim of this article is to explain and compare the changes in climate policy paradigms (CPPs) of Bangladesh and Nepal. Climate policies are shaped by the underlying CPPs that refer to a dominant set of prevailing and institutionalized ideas and strategies to reduce the impacts of climate change. We focus the analysis on the timeframe between 1997 and 2016, using policy documents (n = 46) and semi-structured interviews (n = 43) with key policy actors. We find that in both countries several CPPs have emerged: disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation, mainstreaming, and localized action for adaptation. In Bangladesh, specific policy goals and instruments for each CPP have emerged, whereas in Nepal the government has been struggling to develop specific policy instruments to implement the paradigms. We conclude that competing CPPs currently exist which creates diversified policy responses to climate change impacts in both countries. This 'layering' of different CPPs can be attributed to drivers such as unstable political situation, lack of financial support, influence of national and international non-governmental organizations and global policy frameworks. The findings in our study are relevant to further discussions on how to design future climate policy responses to adapt to climate change.

This paper describes the intervention strategy to improve water security in Sultanpur, a village in periurban Gurgaon, India. Most approaches to improving natural resource management in periurban contexts focus on mobilising the community; little attention is paid to reorienting the state or strengthening the user-bureaucracy interface. This paper describes the action research process that was followed to reorient civic agencies engaged in the provisioning of water and to break from a situation of distrust and prisoners' dilemma between water users and service providers. The paper argues that the creation and provision of a platform for direct engagement between water users and service providers can be a key tool for improving periurban water security. These platforms can provide support in building community resilience to face challenges such as climate variability and urbanisation, both of which threaten periurban water security. The action research emphasises on building the community's capacity to ask for improved water supply and to negotiate with state service providers, rather than augmenting water supply physically.