Inequality,uncertainty,and vulnerability: Rethinking governance from a disaster justice perspective

Theorizing disaster justice and uncertainty: Learning from disaster governance research in Mumbai

In this article, the understanding of uncertainty is drawn from the contexts of coping, resilience and governance as applied to chronic monsoonal flooding in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region. The city of Mumbai in western India is the commercial capital of the state of Maharashtra. Mumbai’s population of more than 20 million ¹ has long been exposed to chronic flooding, with the 2005 flood being a landmark case, causing losses of millions of dollars, over a thousand deaths, and severe loss of property and livelihoods. ² Chronic flooding has become an annual event since 2005, with no remedy available in sight in the context of a crumbling colonial era city infrastructure (especially the storm water drains), increasing encroachments on coastal wetlands and mangroves and amidst increasingly prevalent extreme weather events.

These annual hazards create multiple uncertainties and play out in diverse ways signifying the importance of justice as a key problem. For instance, during a group field trip in July 2016 to an informal settlement affected by chronic flooding in Mumbai, several of these uncertainty-related justice issues came to the fore. Residents spoke of their uncertainty of resettling in safer areas due to narrow definitions of entitlements and citizenship rights. Some migrants were not eligible to resettle and minority community households were discriminated against when it came to allotment, while many households lacked sufficient documentary evidence to make claims. In speaking of their existing conditions that perpetuated injustices, residents complained that uncertainties in legislation about garbage disposal and collection was a key contributing factor to urban flooding. The informal settlements were classified as residential areas; hence, waste that was generated by the very large and diversified livelihood activities, especially garment production in the local sweatshops, was not collected by the municipal agencies, leading to localized dumping along and in the Mithi River that flows beside the settlement. Uncertainty was exacerbated by ill-conceived adaptation strategies that were themselves the outcomes of unequal power relations. A nearby railway colony with the power to exert pressure on the state for flood protection was able to get a wall erected on the other side of the river separating it from the informal settlement, pushing river water back into the slum. Most informal settlements in Mumbai affected by flooding bear witness to such overlapping uncertainties. Changes in temperature and rainfall (Shastri et al., 2015) affect livelihoods on an everyday basis. Discrimination faced by lower castes, migrants and minority community households is further influenced by political cycles, regime changes and legal battles. Urbanization itself, with new real estate projects pushing up rents, causing evictions on a large scale, raising aspirations that can rarely be met through legitimate ways and pushing up the general cost of living, generate multiple constant uncertainties. Each uncertainty is imbued with a series of injustices perpetrated by the democratic state to fulfil citizenship claims before, during and after a disaster. The key point here is not simply one of the structural conditions that shape the experience of disasters and impose a greater risk for the poor during disasters, a point that has been well established by Blaikie et al. (2004). The problem that needs greater recognition is one of active discrimination, neglect and failures that are deeply rooted in social inequalities and hierarchies and that infuse the governance processes – of development, welfare, disaster mitigation and municipal services. In addition, emergent and key risks (Oppenheimer et al., 2014) result from a combination of climate-related extreme events (flooding), unchecked urban growth and environmental degradation and grossly inadequate disaster mitigation efforts. Together, this double helix of developmental and disaster governance ³ failures promotes both uncertainty and injustice among those most exposed to hazards.

Research and policy engagement with climate change and flood-induced disasters in Mumbai began in late 2005 after the disastrous floods in July–August of that year which resulted in huge economic losses, property damage and high mortality rates for human and non-human living beings. Initial studies focused on identifying populations most exposed to flooding (around 30,000 households, offices, amenities and public structures) along the length of the Mithi River – which was the major source of flood waters. ⁴ Resettlement and rehabilitation of these vulnerable sections and structures raised larger questions of social risk, marginalization, gaps in disaster management plans and estimates of social, cultural, economic and political losses to communities affected by chronic flooding, especially in informal settlements (Parthasarathy, 2009, 2015). Subsequent research placed emphasis on more in-depth and qualitative understandings of risk and vulnerability in the context of uncertainties unleashed by climate change and anthropogenic causes of disasters in urban environmental systems. ⁵ These studies focused on different sections of the population including the urban poor, the small-scale and informal retail sector, specific occupations more exposed to hazards (e.g. fishers) and selected middle-class and elite residential areas. I was also involved in evaluations of state-led strategies to mitigate flood and disaster risks that involved detailed stakeholder studies, field level assessments of flood risk, the implementation of flood risk mitigation programs and studies of changed vulnerability situations of those most exposed to flood risk. ⁶ All of these were conducted in the central and western suburbs of Mumbai and in some of its peri-urban areas where urban flooding was exacerbated by the destruction of mangroves, salt pans, mudflats and other coastal ecosystems. Methodologies included detailed structured and semi-structured surveys as well as ethnographic methods, particularly participant observation, focus group interviews and informal interviews.

This article is developed primarily as a theoretical and conceptual study and is based on the just described long-term and ongoing empirical research in Mumbai. ⁷ It presents its arguments in three sections. The next section makes a critical argument for reconceptualizing resilience, governance and justice from a disaster perspective, keeping in mind deep-rooted uncertainties that constitute the new normal. The third section presents the actual uncertainties that populations exposed to hazards constantly face in the Mumbai metropolitan region and brings out the justice problems that such uncertainties give rise to. The final section of the article draws out the implications of these uncertainty and justice problems for a better understanding of and designing strategies for disaster governance.

Disaster justice, uncertainty and resilience

Why and how should we re-conceptualize or re-theorize justice from a disaster governance perspective? Our answers would depend on what kind of idea of justice we propose and how we wish to realize such an idea through a specific set of governance arrangements. For example, the notion of resilience is more often than not described in terms of the character of an individual or population, as a spirit, in terms of a habitus or disposition (Bourdieu, 1990) of a social actor or entity that enables them to cope with, adapt to and bounce back from disasters. ⁸ Such a conceptualization can essentialize and positively/negatively racialize qualities and characteristics associated with resilience. For instance, there is a tendency to describe the poor, African American people, minorities, lower castes or people of the global south as being more vulnerable and resilient at the same time while the better-off are seen as less resilient (Anjaria, 2006). This tendency obfuscates the problem of resilience; does not tell us what social characteristics, structural aspects and forms of social relations engender resilience; and ignores the enormous effort, loss and stress that underlie what appears to be a spontaneous ability to bounce back from a disaster’s aftermath (Parthasarathy, 2015).

This can lead to vague governmental strategies to ‘enhance resilience’ at best, or, at worst, completely neglect disaster risk reduction by citing a population’s high resilience. This problematic idea of resilience hides the uncertainties that at-risk populations are subjected to and thus makes resilience a justice question for disaster governance. Vague and generic descriptions of a population’s intrinsic characteristics (e.g. the ‘spirit of Mumbai’ ⁹ ) can be unjust in and of themselves creating uncertainties in information-gathering, knowledge-processing and myths about the strategizing abilities of a population to independently handle threats and crises. Recognition of these factors can reduce uncertainty and bring justice back into the disaster governance discourse. This is happening, for instance, in the case of ‘emergent groups’ (Stallings and Quarantelli, 1985), which calls for the state to work closely with such groups in designing and implementing disaster management and prevention strategies to understanding why and how certain groups are resilient and others are not. Specifically, this requires the state to understand their social contexts in terms of power, inequality and capability to build on dual strategies for empowerment and re-designing disaster governance by taking into consideration the problems of disempowerment.

Feminist critiques of justice show us how we can re-conceptualize resilience and re-think governance from a justice perspective that goes beyond the mainstream concept of distributive justice. In terms of the classic work of Iris Marion Young (2011a) who is critical of the concept, disasters may be seen as one of the issues that elude the distributive models of justice, since existing fair and just models of distribution may not be equitable when it comes to disaster effects. More significantly, disasters themselves may result in unequal distribution of a public ‘bad’ or negative public good. This can happen, for instance, due to differential dependence on diverse kinds of natural resources by populations for livelihood purposes (e.g. fishers) or differential social and physical locations (e.g. river beds, wetlands, mangroves, sea-fronts) and capabilities. Both of these can be sources of uncertainty – of livelihoods, of risks, of changing exposure to hazards and of risk reduction outcomes (Mehta et al., forthcoming; Parthasarathy, 2009). ¹⁰ A critical and radical departure that Young makes is to move away from a rural to an urban paradigm of community-focused justice that does not valorize the self-sufficiency and coherence of a village community (the latter, a notion that is geographically specific and subject to questioning). Instead, she is cognizant of not only the fuzziness and messiness of urban communities, the contestations and conflicts but also the technologies of dealing with everyday urban negotiations that interconnect communities and evolve norms, rules and regulations for dealing with common threats and problems. In this imagination, justice grows out of difference and inequality and is not constrained by them. Significantly, this perspective also explicitly addresses uncertainty as a problem and offers governance innovations that recognize justice as the problem. The best ideas of distributive justice are unable to effectively account for the diverse experiences, knowledge bases and skills of differently located social actors in dealing with public bads and in providing access to public goods, including symbolic public goods (Rao, 2005), which enable participatory governance of disasters. Reframed as a justice question, the idea of resilience can be thought of and strategized in terms of new associational and institutional forms that incorporate the strengths, capabilities and knowledges of the vulnerable who constantly deal with uncertainty of different kinds and at diverse scales, and not treat them solely as actors in need of help and support.

The most radical concepts of justice are still rooted in a traditional idea of social justice that is based on Fordist social relations that may not reflect the actual reality in different contexts. This is a critique that has been laid against David Harvey’s evolving work on justice and the city, even after his incorporation of environmental problems into the urban studies discourse. In an early review of Harvey’s classic Social Justice and the City, Doreen Massey (1974) pointed to Harvey’s initial failure in ignoring the wider social structure while critiquing capitalism’s distribution problem. Reflecting upon the Boxing Day Indian Ocean tsunami and undersea earthquake of 2004, Greenhough et al. (2005) hint at the obligation and responsibility of academic scholars to rethink such questions by stating that ‘it is not enough to be politically accountable or ethically reflexive’ (p. 71), and ‘we need to ask ourselves how and if indeed we can be not only theoretically insightful and empirically rigorous – but also generous, engaged, responsible, effective?’ (p. 71) Can one therefore think of disaster governance in terms of a ‘distributive injustice’? Given the disruption in our understanding of spatialities and temporalities caused by disasters such as the 2004 tsunami, what kind of ‘justice gaps’ (Finger, 2014) do we need to identify, such that our disaster governance can be substantially improved? How does one account for the uncertainties unleashed by natural variability as well as the specific interaction of natural hazards with human actions to result in particular disasters? ¹¹ Disasters do affect cross-sections of the population differentiated by gender, age, income, race, class and geography. Populations across cleavages may be affected in similar ways, with differential resilience. When disaster outcomes are distributed unevenly, it is not a question of uneven distribution of welfare, but an unequal distribution of ill-fare. Public bads are unequally concentrated. Some localities, social groups, communities and individuals are more affected than others. These are also at the social margins, are socially excluded, in some ways disadvantaged, or discriminated against. The intersection of such exclusion and marginalization with the unequal distribution of adverse impacts needs to be analysed together with standard forms of development inequalities, such that the injustice of ‘uncaring’ and neglect is brought to the fore. This requires a different conceptualization of justice, in which ethics of care and ethics of justice converge.

Justice, care and uncertainty: The problem of institutions and governance

Rejecting the distinction between ethic of care and justice that gained some currency in feminist debates, Susan Okin (1989) argues that it has little utility in evolving an acceptable moral and political theory to reject modes of social organization that are indefensible. In thinking about justice, Okin makes reason and affect converge as a way of bringing suffering in a more central way into our discourse. In disaster contexts, uncertainty is experienced as a feeling; it constitutes an existential mode that creates deep anxieties and ill-being. If, as she states, the gendered (hetero-normative) family itself can be just or unjust, in similar vein, a society in which disaster is the new normal itself can be termed as just or unjust depending on who is affected, how equitably the disaster outcomes are managed and what kind of transformative governance ensues in disaster mitigation strategies. Okin further argues that in order to achieve a ‘well-ordered society’, humans need to develop ‘capacities for empathy, care, and concern for others’ (p. 248). Might not we argue in a similar vein that for disaster justice to be achieved, not just individual human beings but also institutions of governance need to develop such capacities? In other words, the ethic of care as a justice issue seeks to address uncertainty experienced by those who are excluded from a ‘well-ordered society’; in this case, those most at-risk from hazards. This, one might argue, would make institutions more flexible by incorporating justice concerns into their everyday, generic functions as well as re-orienting these functions to mitigate disaster risk. While it may be argued that the normative bases of an ethic of care are different from those that inform justice concerns, the argument here is that disasters pose new ways of integrating the normative bases of care that expand the rights that are normally attached to citizenship. The failure to incorporate an ethic of care thus impinges on citizenship rights and capabilities that are essential for citizens to survive and access their rights under conditions of uncertainty. Further, this failure impedes the ability of citizens to fully participate in governance for disaster risk reduction. An ethic of care indicates to citizens that the state and society they are related to are interested in adaptive efficiency (North, 2003), ¹² not just allocative efficiency, either in a neo-classical economics sense or in a distributive justice sense.

Contrarily, a lack of empathy, care and concern would lead institutions to use ‘expertise’ and science to de-politicize inequality and marginalization problems in disaster governance. This can happen by opting for easy solutions which are ‘visible’ and which showcase the efficiency of disaster governance by mitigating risk in areas where the rich, elites and capital congregate to the relative neglect of the dispossessed, the marginalized, the poor and the disempowered (Parthasarathy, 2009). States usually find it easy to address problems affecting the vocal minority rather than the invisibilized majority which is more vulnerable and exposed to hazards. In effect, this indicates that some justice solutions and adaptation interventions can lead to injustice for certain sections of the population. In such cases, disaster justice is useful as a pragmatic concept that helps us address problems of power and inequality, as it focuses on the kind of unjust society which, as Verchick (2012) states, ‘allows a “disaster underclass” to grow unnoticed in a nation committed to freedom and democracy’ (p. 25). In his detailed and insightful note on disaster justice, Verchick stresses the imperative of understanding the “social and political meaning” of both disaster and of justice, and, following the work of Shklar (1990), frames the disaster justice discourse in terms of agency and perspective. At every stage of the disaster governance cycle – planning, response, compensation and recovery – one can find problems of injustice in its multiple facets, some universal, others singular to specific social, spatial and temporal contexts. Scapegoating the poor and vulnerable is a key universal aspect of disaster injustice, even though, as studies have shown, these groups may be less to blame and more willing to help and contribute to disaster governance, while the dominant classes may be equally if not (frequently) more responsible for disasters and less obliged to participate in planning and recovery operations (Parthasarathy, 2015).

I would like to reframe the inequality/discrimination and disaster impacts/injustice linkage by questioning the notion that there is a large gap between the vulnerable and the resilient, and that it needs to be bridged. Vulnerability, in fact, can be a contributor to resilience, ¹³ but of a kind that is unjust in terms of the burdens that the vulnerable and at-risk populations have to bear. ¹⁴ Vulnerability coupled with resilience in a society where the ‘disaster underclass’ is blamed constantly ¹⁵ for putting the rest of society at risk constitutes a double injustice. In the immediate aftermath of the disastrous 2005 floods in Mumbai, slum dwellers and the urban poor living along the banks of the Mithi River were blamed by the government for the flooding. By contrast, many corporate firms located along the same river were in contravention of environmental regulations but were not blamed in official discourses. Moreover, a ‘dominant governance regime’ that constrains ‘traditional ways of responding to (these) uncertainties’ (Mehta et al., forthcoming: 2, 11) contributes to ‘unwarranted social deprivation’ (Verchick, 2012: 54) in disaster contexts as much as other spheres of life. They ‘limit the adaptive space, capacity and pathways to address climate induced uncertainties’ (Mehta et al., forthcoming: 2). Here, the key insight is one of a deep injustice that underlies the phenomenon of inaction where possibility of risk mitigation and damage clearly exists, such as in New Orleans or Mumbai. This inaction converts into chronic uncertainty, as hazard-exposed populations are rendered both incapable of coping with disasters and unable to influence risk reduction strategies. At an idealistic level, democracy can offer solutions to this; however, from a pragmatic perspective, what would work to reduce this ‘unjustified passivity in the face of disaster’ (Verchick, 2012 citing Shklar, 1990: 54) is a fully and effectively functioning set of institutions and agents of governance, which frames clear rules and norms to deal with inequality and power while designing risk reduction strategies.

For disaster governance institutions and actors to actually incorporate justice concerns, they need to have an idea of justice that captures the ethic of consequentialism and the ethic of organizational and behavioural appropriateness. Amartya Sen (2011) captures this in the distinction he makes between two classical Indian notions of justice – niti and nyaya. While the former (niti) may be regarded as a narrow, principle-based notion of justice, the latter (nyaya) is viewed as a broader notion that considers means and consequences of a course of action in achieving desired objectives. In reality, however, especially in modern constitutional democracies, the two often overlap. However, as Ghosh (2012) has shown in interpreting Sen’s work, the idea of justice as nyaya is more flexible, is ‘attuned to actual institutions and experiences of human lives’ (p. 809) and offers an ethically informed strategy to guide governmental disaster mitigation policies from a consequentialist perspective. Together with the feminist critiques of justice referred to earlier, this would allow us to rethink institutions that address uncertainty by recognizing the importance of flexibility, avoiding the problems of rigid bureaucracies and incorporating the messiness of human social processes in institutional design. For this notion of justice as nyaya to work, democracy has to enable moral claims for justice to be made by those affected by a disaster at different scales. This is something one constantly sees in the field, especially in informal settlements among people eking out livelihoods in the informal sector in Mumbai. Such populations have long learnt to cope with state inaction in providing access to housing, sanitation, basic infrastructure and amenities and stable sources of income. Disasters – whether or not these are blamed on anthropogenic factors – introduce new sources of stress, which despite considerable resilience add yet another layer of uncertainty and vulnerability to groups at risk, forcing them to make claims on the state couched in justice terms. These claims ironically can be responded to in ways that generate more injustice for the most vulnerable. Grove (2014), in his study of disaster resilience in Jamaica, deploys the term ‘adaptation machines’, following Deleuze and Guattari. As disasters become a public spectacle and a symbol of the state’s inefficiency in a neoliberal world where the state has to ensure the safety and security of capital along with accumulation, the state begins to deploy adaptation machines, in association with international aid agencies, corporate sponsored NGOs and think tanks and the corporate media. In Mumbai, settlements that are vulnerable are the first to get bulldozed in the name of disaster mitigation. Under these conditions, compensation and rehabilitation are subjected to neoliberal norms, and locations of capital accumulation, power and status take precedence in disaster mitigation plans and implementation (Parthasarathy, 2009).

The ‘adaptation machine’ of the state, aid agencies, media and NGOs rely on the resilience of the at-risk population. The celebration of this resilience, even to the extent of describing its immanence among a section of the population (Anjaria, 2006), allows the state to enact partial policies or ignore vulnerable people altogether in disaster governance. As researchers, we then have a responsibility to nuance our descriptions and interpretations of resilience. As such, we need to be slightly wary of a capabilities approach to social justice that Martha Nussbaum advocates (2003), since the very presence of some capabilities may offer an excuse for state and society to be selectively passive and inactive in disaster situations. However, Nussbaum herself offers a way out by suggesting that ‘we need to have an account, for political purposes of what the central human capabilities are’ (p. 56, italicized for emphasis), in order ‘to get a vision of social justice that will have the requisite critical force and definiteness to direct social policy’ (p. 56). The state has to recognize that claims for disaster justice come from a desperate need for help, that human beings require a measure of well-being and are not just agents of production and consumption (Nussbaum, 2003: 54). Stressing that there is a dignity to human need, Nussbaum attempts to conceptualize the human person beyond a producing agent and argues for designing social institutions on that basis. Both disaster governance and disaster justice come together in such a perspective, offering a concrete idea of what kind of institutions need to be designed to ensure disaster justice. A gendered analysis of disasters shows that the failure to think of ‘gender relations (as) part of the human experience of disasters’, may in certain circumstances result in ‘the denial of the fundamental human rights of women and girls in crisis’ (Enarson et al., 2007). Institutions become significant in addressing inequality-related vulnerabilities and in framing rights as a justice problem.

Tackling disaster governance: Environment, livelihoods and disaster justice

The livelihood uncertainties unleashed by environmental degradation and marginalization from the ecological commons, and their disaster risk consequences, offer another lens to capture the disaster justice–uncertainty relationship. Disaster protection functions of ecologies and their capacities to enhance adaptation and reduce exposure to flood risks (e.g. mangroves and coastal wetlands provide this function) are rarely a formal component of disaster governance regimes. From a governance perspective, the notion of adaptive efficiency as opposed to allocative efficiency suggested by proponents of new institutionalism in economics such as Douglass North (2003) could offer new pathways for research and conceptualization of ‘disaster justice’, especially when it comes to enhancing resilience of vulnerable communities. The former is a dynamic concept while the latter is a static one; hence, as North argues, the former is more suited for policy making in the context of inequalities.

Bringing together these diverse approaches and perspectives, one can begin to develop an epistemology for disaster justice that is strongly rooted in the idea of the human being as ‘in need of a rich plurality of life-activities’ (Nussbaum, 2003: 54). This means that the idea of a city, of its governance, of urban ecological problems and how we imagine solutions to mitigate anthropogenic climate change through a disaster justice lens need to integrate communities which we do not necessarily think of as urban (e.g. artisanal fishers). ¹⁶ This means that we tolerate, accept and encourage economic forms and livelihood options that are not necessarily modern and industrial and that reflect a plurality of life activities. These notions are reflected in the claims that coastal communities in India, and around the world, are making in response to what has been termed ‘ocean grabbing’ (Bennett et al., 2015). With climate change, coastal zones are vulnerable to sea level rise, coastal erosion and accretion, storms and cyclones and other extreme weather events. At the same time, communities and populations struggle to cope with new coastal claims for land and sea, threats from global capital, intense competition for resources amidst scarcity and urbanization into coastal areas. Frameworks that address coastal livelihoods, rural–urban governance and resource sustainability in an integrated manner (e.g. integrated coastal management approaches) need to work with alternative epistemologies of life and livelihood around which artisanal fishers, for instance, have launched struggles.

These alternative epistemologies explicitly acknowledge and help cope with natural and human-induced uncertainties. New coastal claims in regions like Mumbai, in larger Asian urban agglomerations and around the world, deny possible and potential solutions to environmental, climate change and disaster conundrums and disallow scope for alternative knowledge to become available for disaster governance. ¹⁷ It is no coincidence that artisanal fishers in India’s coasts have advanced beyond their livelihood arguments for protecting their coastal habitats to focus on disaster prevention and climate change/environmental degradation as outcomes of good coastal zone management practices and regulations (Parthasarathy, 2011). Increasingly, coastal inhabitants have begun to use rights-based, legal, para-legal, alternate dispute redressal mechanisms and justice arguments for environmental protection and conservation that impinge on their livelihoods. ¹⁸

Disaster Justice debates can begin with problems of power, agency and inequality, but to make a difference to the quality of disaster governance practices, they need to incorporate broader concerns of capabilities, knowledge sets, life and livelihood alternatives and the moral claims that people are allowed to make on the state and its institutions. Disaster governance itself has been much theorized and critiqued. Rather than provide an overview of the concept and practice, we choose to highlight only two aspects that are of relevance to the foregoing discussion on uncertainty, resilience, vulnerability and inequality: (a) disaster governance as a set of institutions that may be a combination of public, private, local, regional and national, formal and informal, and that directly seek to mitigate disaster risk and provide relief, rescue and rehabilitation after a disaster; and (b) governance institutions and agencies that provide varied services from municipal waste management to water supply, urban planning, security, environmental management and transport and that impinge directly and indirectly both on the causation of disasters and risk reduction.

In the section that follows, some insights from field research on uncertainty in the context of chronic flooding in Mumbai are presented; the implications of our findings for expanding our understanding of disaster justice are briefly drawn, with respect to the debates and arguments presented above.

Uncertainty and the socio-political context of Mumbai’s disasters

In the absence of state responsibility for disaster risk reduction, communities must depend on local political leaders. Short-term palliatives and surface measures are offered, which tend to dissipate over time. Identity politics can come into play, disallowing the flood victims to imagine an alternative politics around disaster mitigation, especially as most of the vulnerable in Mumbai are dalits, migrants or religious minorities (Parthasarathy, 2009). The uncertainty unleashed by state action through inefficient risk mitigation strategies (e.g. walls along the river) and through inaction is further aggravated by shifts in political regimes. When rightwing, nativist or anti-migrant parties are in power, disaster-prone communities tend to be ignored as they are usually minorities, migrants, lower caste or a combination of these groupings. This emerges quite strongly in our fieldwork, as in addition to uncertainties in disaster mitigation, compensation and rehabilitation, flood victims are also systematically denied access to urban amenities and livelihoods. ²⁰ Yet another kind of uncertainty overlaps with these, as informal settlements are under constant threat of eviction, demolition and relocation. In addition, there are threats of violence from the majority community, and uncertainties related to amenities and services including education, health, waste management, sanitation, water and energy. The cumulative effects of these injustices are multiple deprivations and cascading discriminations, which translate into poor adaptation and coping mechanisms, and exclusion from transformative governance related to flood disaster mitigation. ²¹

Hence, we observe that the wider political economy, political ecology and macroeconomic and political changes can have effects that may be more drastic than climate change (e.g. land and water grabs, changes in technology and displacement). This integrated understanding of justice and the lived realities of local people, irrespective of their socio-economic positionality, but especially in the global South, are not captured by models, diagrams, regressions, simulations and scenario analysis (Mehta et al., forthcoming). The voices and representations of those experiencing disasters on a regular and sustained basis do not make their way into the narratives and the discourses of ‘above’ – the experts, modellers, climate scientists and the epistemic communities. ²² A frequent observation from the field is the absence of localized hazard maps and predictions, based on micro-climate, topography, hydrology and the nature of the built environment (Parthasarathy, 2009). This then relates back to how academic research incorporates justice issues into its research and articulations, as Massey urges us to do. This would support the justice framework of the IPCC, which advocates a move towards a robust decision-making framework that recognizes the ‘importance of governance, ethical dimensions, equity, value judgments, economic assessments and diverse perceptions and responses to risk and uncertainty’ (Field et al., 2014: 17). Ontological differences exist in how climate change and disaster events are conceptualized and understood by diverse actors, and how uncertainties manifest in discourse and practice. Theorizing about uncertainty from ‘above’ (by experts, natural scientists and modellers) may have very little to do with how people understand and cope with uncertainty in everyday settings from ‘below’. The livelihood practices and human activities of tens of thousands of fishers in the Mumbai region, for example, that are threatened by urbanization, new coastal land and ocean grabbing and climate change, are unrepresented in climate simulation models, public discourse and policy. We need to ask questions about what is the level of convergence or divergence of climate centred uncertainty with other contributors to uncertainty. Justice problems can be addressed when different perspectives from ‘above’ create enabling conditions for the most vulnerable section of the population to adapt to climate change challenges. On the other hand, when injustices present barriers to effective coping and adaptation, they expose those ‘below’ to amplified uncertainties which challenge the sustainability of their livelihoods and resource bases in the city. These injustices can be caused by narrow technical solutions (flood walls), inadequate knowledge of the topography of informal settlements (urban planning problems, such as large gaps and missing information in Mumbai’s development plans) or by the failure to design and implement disaster risk reduction strategies in marginal localities. The justice discourse gains significance in such cases, because the criticism is not only one of the harms created by narrowly conceived socio-technical systems but also of the way in which such systems come into existence in the first place.

Hence, the issue of justice needs to be addressed more directly when communities who are affected by chronic disasters and compound disasters (Douglass, 2016) lack the ability or are excluded from strategies of disaster governance at the city or regional level to mitigate flood risk. While sections of the population are vulnerable and exposed to large degrees of uncertainties on many fronts, they do not lack the ability to imagine a transformed future for themselves that is risk-free. Fish workers in Mumbai, who are especially exposed to uncertainty and hazards, have long been among the most vocal in raising questions and offering suggestions for more sustainable coastal management regulations practices (Chouhan et al., 2017). However, they are unable to build resilience as they are excluded from public discourse and strategizing about transformative adaptation. This exclusion happens for two reasons. First, the state is unwilling to consider community discourses and inputs into policy making as it would affect neoliberal urbanization and the allocation of land to capital, affecting desired economic growth trajectories. Second, in the larger process of disaster governance, certain questions remain unasked due to political and economic reasons, such as lack of participation, and inadequate knowledge and skills to enable implementation. These are significant as they enable a consideration of all alternate scenarios, through which a process of movement away from uncertainty can then be launched. Examples of these questions might include:

Who are, or should be, involved in the processes and conceptualization of transformative disaster governance?

For the justice discourse to be embedded more strongly in the disaster governance framework, each of these questions need to be posed and responded to in organizational and strategic terms. Overall, resilience building strategies tend to lack the transformative element of incorporating the perspectives and knowledge of impacted communities that is crucial for better adaptation to environmental threats and hazards.

Contexts of uncertainties and risks in Mumbai: Climate, urban planning and municipal governance

In Mumbai, our field research from 2006 onward showed daily or everyday uncertainties that go beyond climate-related and environmental impacts; these include economic, political and social uncertainties such as inflation, education, access to basic services, job security, housing and communal conflicts. Amidst such intense and diverse uncertainties, more rational and ‘scientific’ understandings of disasters among vulnerable people tend to be substituted by blaming fate, undermining their existing knowledge and skills in dealing with disasters, and in turn increasing uncertainties. ²⁴

Long-term planning as a whole is constrained by the complex political economy of Mumbai, with different state actors (urban, municipal, regional planning, coastal management, pollution control, forestry and hydrological) vying for authority and power. Institutional disarray relates to land ownership and governance in preventing flood mitigation strategies from being implemented and finds expression in cases of conflicts and disagreement between the state railway and the municipal agencies over the construction of storm water drains (Parthasarathy, 2016). Institutional and epistemological balkanization of functions impede flood mitigation, resulting in ineffective waste management, pollution control, urban planning, welfare housing, resources management and industrial zoning. None of these overlapping spheres of authority addresses disaster management problems, even though they have a substantial contribution to make both to the occurrence of disasters and to their prevention (Parthasarathy, 2016).

There is also considerable knowledge and planning uncertainty deriving from evolving master plans and political directives – as is seen in the ongoing controversy surrounding Mumbai’s development plan till the year 2034. A large number of errors, omissions and gaps have been pointed out by NGOs, activists, media and citizens. Environmental activists have specifically mentioned the errors and omissions related to the zoning and governance of mangroves, open spaces, forests and coastal ecosystem resources, which play a significant role in regional hydrological and flood management, and which work as localized barriers to flooding. ²⁵

Large-scale exclusions are observed in strategies that are aimed at preventing the impacts of impending disasters. A frequent complaint in disaster-prone zones is about a lack of effective warnings, and the failure to conduct regular drills – both of which are more efficient in elite, less flood-prone areas. An inequality problem worsens this inefficiency. Since migrant households are frequently mobile, state agencies are unable or unwilling to design strategies that function around a mobile population not easily available for warnings and drills (Inamdar et al., 2016). Disaster management plans for the city and metropolitan region are skewed in terms of how well or efficiently they are made and implemented in different residential zones of the city (Parthasarathy, 2009). Against this, some recent action research projects have begun to address such inequalities and exclusions through participatory disaster risk mapping exercises. Such exercises offer an alternative approach to disaster governance that address justice issues (Samaddar et al., 2011; Tatano and Samaddar, 2010). They also help us better engage with global discourses that recognize people as infrastructure (Simone, 2004), while enabling the use of locally relevant knowledge of lower level municipal ward officials who develop their own infrastructural capabilities for disaster risk reduction.

Disaster rehabilitation and uncertainties

Eligibility issues for rehabilitation and resettlement for flood victims reflect the arbitrary injustice to which populations at risk are subjected. The poor, the migrants and disenfranchised minorities find it difficult to prove long-term residency or domicile in Mumbai due to a lack of documentary evidence and are hence considered ineligible for rehabilitation and compensation, despite having constitutional citizenship rights (Inamdar et al., 2016). As is now well known through numerous studies, displacement arising from disaster-induced voluntary and involuntary resettlement magnifies changes in existing patterns of social organization. A pre- and post-study in Mumbai (Inamdar et al., 2016) reveals that these changes occur at many levels of long-established residential neighbourhoods, resulting in families being scattered and informal social networks that provide mutual help becoming non-functional. Trade linkages between producers and their customers are interrupted, and local labour markets are disrupted. Formal and informal associations are wiped out. Traditional management systems tend to lose their leaders. Material and cultural losses can be enormous. These cumulate to the physical exclusion of the affected households from a geographic territory and their economic and social exclusion from functioning social networks. This reflects the lack of attention to ‘people as infrastructure’ (Simone, 2004) in disaster governance, as pointed out earlier in this article. Further, community facilities and amenities are not always retained in new locations, even if these are in some cases better in certain locations. After resettlement, communities living in a single neighbourhood tend to be scattered as households from the same locality are given flats in different places or buildings, eroding feelings of social security and community ties that provide mutual support in times of need and crisis. Justice is also about what kind of community households wish to live in, and can rely upon, given their socio-political and economic constraints and their own position in the social structure. ²⁶

In general, in our previous and ongoing research, communities and individuals articulated uncertainty in the form of an inability, a feeling of impotence and a lack of agency to take charge of their lives. All the above issues drew on strong feelings of anguish, fear, pain and torment reflecting their situation of structurally induced injustice they felt unable to deal with and respond to. Most individuals we spoke with wished to get out of the kind of impasse in which they felt they were imprisoned: Beyond the uncertainty of living through seasonal monsoon crises, they also felt constrained by other social and political factors and therefore unable to take charge of their lives. A deep frustration was expressed in terms of injustice by the state to fulfil promises and address their rightful claims as citizens and as humans.

Each of the above points also relates to the discussion of justice presented in the first section. Critical issues relate to how we conceptualize and address problems of resilience, capabilities, agency, power, distribution of just and unjust effects of disasters, the ethics of care, the idea of a rich plurality of life activities and above all the manifold dimensions of constant uncertainty. Each of these needs to be understood and captured by institutions and linked to a disaster governance framework that substantially incorporates a justice perspective. A few broad directions towards this are outlined in the final section below.