Cities in Southeast Asia face various institutional barriers to cope with climate and water-related challenges. Several international programs for urban flood resilience therefore stress the importance of local institutional capacity building in initiating and delivering flood adaptation solutions. However, research to provide insights and recommendations into whether and how such international resilience programs could enable the building of local institutional capacities remains scarce. To bridge this gap, this paper presents an analytical framework to study institutional capacity building by international resilience programs, focusing on intellectual, social and political capital. The central case is the development and implementation of the Water as Leverage (WaL) program in Semarang, Indonesia. Our main results show that this program was able to stimulate the integration of knowledge, building of local coalitions and creation of adaptation narratives, which contributed to developing six strategic climate resilience proposals. This paper reflects on institutional strengths and weaknesses, and concludes that although the WaL program introduced an innovative approach for collaboration between international experts, urban designers and local stakeholders, sustaining momentum for the reflexive learning process, involving city-based NGOs and establishing formal links with decision makers were key challenges that hindered the development of institutional capacities to implement the developed proposals.

Is Bangkok becoming more resilient to flooding? A framing analysis of Bangkok's flood resilience policy combining insights from both insiders and outsiders. Cities, 90,[157][158][159][160][161][162][163][164][165][166][167]

In response to the rising climatic impacts on worldwide urbanized deltas, the Netherlands has strategically and politically framed Dutch water management as a global water solution for improving water safety and flood protection in other countries such as Vietnam. Being renowned for its water management approach, the Netherlands is particularly active in sharing water knowledge, insights, and policies internationally. This paper connects a framing perspective to policy translation studies to understand the role of language and meaning-making in the cross-border travel of policies. Adopting a framing perspective, it presents four dimensions of water policy translation concerning how policy frames are being created and interpretedduring the cross-border travel. The paper follows the process of the Dutch water management approach being 'packaged' as global water solutions and 'translated' to inform the development of the Vietnamese Mekong Delta Plan of 2013. The results show that although similar concepts, metaphors and narratives could be witnessed in this translation process, the local use and interpretation of these concepts remain challenging. Inclusive engagement, shared and comprehensive understanding, and continuous exchange and learning processes could help to improve cross-border policy-making for sustainable delta management.

No abstract

Policy makers in Southeast Asian flood-vulnerable regions are confronted with various institutional challenges when planning for inclusive flood resilience. This paper focuses on the role of international resilience programs and investigates how these programs can enable institutional transformation. The key question is which institutional conditions promote the development and implementation of inclusive flood resilience strategies by international resilience programs. The Mekong Delta Plan in Vietnam (MDP) and the Water as Leverage for Resilient Cities Asia (WaL) program in Semarang, Indonesia, are selected as the cases for a comparative analysis. To structure the comparative analysis of these programs, the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework is adopted and operationalized for the institutional analysis of inclusive flood resilience planning. The findings illustrate that whereas the MDP was able to involve decision makers from the national government and international financial institutions for mobilizing funding and technical support, the strength of the WaL program was its enabling environment for the cocreation of context-specific flood resilience proposals. Overall, this study concludes that the institutional conditions that enable project financing and the implementation of long-term and integrated flood resilience solutions are determined by engagement with national governments and by ownership of the solutions at both the national and local levels.