Resilience building has become a growing policy agenda, particularly for urban risk management. While much of the resilience agenda has been shaped by policies and discourses from the global North, its applicability for cities of the global South, particularly African cities, has not been sufficiently assessed. Focusing on rights of urban citizens as the object to be made resilient, rather than physical and ecological infrastructures, may help to address many of the root causes that characterize the unacceptable risks that urban residents face on a daily basis. Linked to this idea, we discuss four entry points for grounding a rights and justice orientation for urban resilience. First, notions of resilience must move away from narrow, financially oriented risk analyses. Second, opportunities must be created for "negotiated resilience", to allow for attention to processes that support these goals, as well as for the integration of diverse interests. Third, achieving resilience in ways that do justice to the local realities of diverse urban contexts necessitates taking into account endogenous, locally situated processes, knowledges and norms. And finally, urban resilience needs to be placed within the context of global systems, providing an opportunity for African contributions to help reimagine the role that cities might play in these global financial, political and science processes.

Resilience is increasingly applied the context of water systems, and water governance more broadly, in response to climate change impacts, hydrologic variability and uncertainty associated with various dimensions of global environmental change. However, the meanings, applications and implications of resilience as it relates to water governance are still poorly understood. Drawing on a systematic scoping review of the peer‐reviewed academic literature, this paper addresses the questions: how is resilience framed in relation to water systems and water governance, how are diverse resilience framings (re)shaping ideas and trends in water management, and what are the associated implications? The analysis found that the resilience‐informed water governance literature remains fragmented and predominantly centered on conventional approaches and framings of water planning, with a predominant focus on engineering resilience in water supply infrastructure. A recently emerging engagement with resilience in the water governance literature, however, draws on more diverse framings and theories and calls for a shift towards more integrative and ecologically‐centered thinking in water governance. Despite this, significant empirical and conceptual gaps remain, particularly around the integration of the various subsectors of water governance and, more importantly, around the institutional and governance dimensions of building water resilience. This article is categorized under: Engineering Water > Planning Water Human Water > Water Governance

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In the aftermath of the acute water crisis, building resilience in the water sector has become a priority for the City of Cape Town. In this piece, I discuss several emerging lessons from Cape Town's experience and their implications for water resilience more broadly. While having avoided “Day Zero,” Cape Town has also demonstrated how unprepared many municipalities might be as they face growing variability and uncertainty in the hydrologic cycle. Second, Cape Town's experience also signals the limits of conventional demand and supply paradigms that focus on high efficiency and overallocation of water resources. Furthermore, Cape Town's deeply unequal waterscape and acutely divisive politics are among the most important factors that shaped not only how the crisis unfolded, but also the ability of governance systems to respond in a timely and adequate manner. This article is categorized under: Engineering Water > Planning Water Human Water > Water Governance

Drawing from the proceedings of an expert workshop with academics, researchers, government and NGO participants working in diverse countries in southern Africa and beyond, this paper reviews the discourse on resilience, both conceptually and in practice. We highlight opportunities to develop and apply more situated, equity-sensitive and context-relevant understanding of resilience, particularly in the water sector. To pursue more just and resilient water futures in highly unequal and water stressed regions, we propose that researchers and practitioners (1) place greater emphasis on the transformative potential of resilience, (2) broaden the social dimensions of resilience to account more fully for intangible and other social factors, (3) engage critically with the decision-making processes and practices of building resilience, (4) contribute to the development of indicators and guidelines for building just and resilient water futures, (5) strengthen the role of situated knowledges, (6) critically engage with scale and boundaries in complex adaptive systems, and (7) strengthen the policy-science-civil society interface.