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Lisa Palmer, Yale Environment 360
Colombian Farmers Adjust to Changing Conditions With “Climate-Smart” Agriculture
›February 10, 2015 // By Wilson Center Staff
Rice is a thirsty crop. Yet for the past three years, Alberto Mejia has been trying to reduce the amount of water he uses for irrigation on his 1,100-acre farm near Ibague in the tropical, central range of the Colombian Andes.
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Lisa Palmer, Future Food 2050
Greener Pastures for Cattle Ranching
›November 26, 2014 // By Wilson Center Staff
Imagine an overgrown perennial garden. Impenetrable, shrubby bushes knit themselves together in long rows. Grasses reach chest high. Native hardwood trees hog the perimeter.
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Book Review: ‘Oil Sparks in the Amazon: Local Conflicts, Indigenous Populations, and Natural Resources’
›August 18, 2014 // By Roger-Mark De SouzaSince the early 1990s, the rising price of crude oil and other key natural resources – and the resulting drive by governments and private companies to extract those resources – has led to sharp conflicts in Latin America. At the core of these disputes is the clash between national economic interest and the rights of indigenous people inhabiting the land where most natural resources are located.
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Nick Snow, Oil and Gas Journal
Analyst Urges Broader Look at Amazon Oil’s Local Impacts
›March 27, 2014 // By Wilson Center StaffIncreasingly disruptive protests are likely if oil, gas, and mining companies and national governments don’t pay closer attention to indigenous populations’ needs as Western Amazon basin resources are developed, an expert warned.
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First “Nexus Dialogue” on Water, Energy, and Food Kicks Off in Nairobi
›Water, energy, and food – this “nexus” of interrelated resource issues continues to garner attention from analysts, policymakers, and the media. Over the next four decades global population is projected to increase to about 9.6 billion and, worldwide, demand for water is projected to increase 55 percent; energy, 80 percent; and food, 60 percent. In a new video about the first of a series of workshops on this nexus, the International Union for Conservation on Nature and the International Water Association explain how they are working to bring together private and public sector water infrastructure experts from across Africa and the world to build partnerships and create some consensus on a “nexus-based approach” to managing scarce resources.
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Autumn Spanne, The Daily Climate
Colombia’s Unexplored Cloud Forests Besieged by Climate Change, Development
›December 13, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Autumn Spanne, appeared on The Daily Climate.
Five hours by truck and mule from the nearest town, a rumbling generator cuts through the silent night to power large spotlights as botanists crouch and kneel on large blue tarps spread across a cow pasture. It’s nearly midnight, and the team works urgently to describe every detail of the dozens of colorful orchids, ferns, and other exotic plants they have collected that day in Las Orquídeas National Park, one of the single most biologically diverse places on the planet.
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Social Interaction Key to Urban Resilience, Says Harvard’s Diane Davis
›November 7, 2012 // By Payal Chandiramani“Resilience is the capacity of individuals and institutions to cope and adapt in the stress of chronic violence in ways that allow them room for maneuver and hope for the future,” said Diane Davis, Harvard professor of urbanism and development, in an interview at the Wilson Center.
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Urban Resilience: What Is It and How Can We Promote It?
›A new study on the intersection of violence and economic development in cities breaks new ground by examining how communities respond to and cope with extant violence, rather than focusing on the root causes of violence in a given area. Authors Diane Davis, Harvard professor of urbanism and development, and John Tirman, executive director of MIT’s Center for International Studies, spoke at length about the origins, methodology, and findings of the report, Urban Resilience in Situations of Chronic Conflict, at the Wilson Center on July 12. The report was supported by USAID’s Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation.
“We made the decision that we weren’t going to produce yet another research project or study on the root causes of violence, because there is a lot of incredibly good work on that [already],” said Davis. “We wanted to take a totally different angle…to try to think about taking a more pragmatic approach that builds on how everyday people, who live with violence, respond.”
To do this, Davis and Tirman focused their research on seven cities around the world with histories of chronic violence, creating a case study for each and then comparing results. (An eighth city, Karachi, was jettisoned because it was deemed too unsafe for research.) The comparative process allowed Davis and Tirman to develop a basic theoretical framework for how different factors increase or decrease a community’s resilience to violence.
Defining Resilience
The term “resilience” lies at the heart of the new study. “The idea of ‘bouncing back,’ or returning to normalcy, is [generally] the measurement standard for looking at resilience,” Davis said.
However, she was quick to point out the problems with such a simplistic definition. “[In] cities of the developing world…things are in flux. So it’s really hard to know what a ‘bouncing back’ is if things are constantly changing.”“Also,” she added, “in many of the environments we were looking at, violence is a consequence of the way things were under normal conditions. So you don’t necessarily want to bounce back to those conditions that were producing the violence in the first place.”
Davis and Tirman sidestepped these problems by letting their research define successful resilience, rather than trying to fit their results to a prefabricated definition of the word. In doing so, they were able to identify several important commonalities in the cities and communities that displayed the most positive resilience to violence.
“Our findings suggest that resilience appears at the interface of civilian and state action,” Davis writes in the report. She underscored the significance of civilians as facilitators in both developing and implementing better security policies: “People who live in violence know more than academics or policymakers about what they can and can’t do to deal with the problem of violence,” she said.
Focus on Community
Davis and Tirman pointed out that the most successfully resilient cities they studied – Mexico City, Managua, and especially Medellín – seemed to have a number of civilian/state relationships defined “from below,” rather than the more problematic “top down” approach. This means that civilians and communities were participating on their own terms, collaborating with city planners and with law enforcement agencies to get their needs met rather than simply being what Davis called “yes men” to higher authorities.
Physical space – what Davis referred to as “the weight of the spatial” – also played a very significant role in Urban Resilience. She and Tirman made the conscious decision to incorporate physical planning and design into their research, eschewing the more typical sectoral approach to violence and security.
This methodological break from the existing literature was particularly useful in demonstrating that violence-plagued communities are often themselves the most important agents of resilience. “Citizens have to be able to make real decisions on their own,” Davis stressed in the Q&A; session that followed her and Tirman’s presentation. “[They] have to feel that ownership, that autonomy of the decisions in their neighborhood, even if they’re bad [decisions], because that’s what ties them to each other.”
“We think the starting point for generating resilience is really supporting and enabling communities to make dense horizontal relationships with others in their neighborhood, across sectors, that allow them to push back against perpetrators of violence.”
In other words, while the state can play a significant role in helping communities to mitigate violence, successful resilience ultimately requires the commitment and participation of the communities in question.
“The state might have a security program, it might have a planning program, but every decision has to be made with an understanding of what’s good for that particular neighborhood,” Davis said.
Places People Want to Protect
Davis was very succinct in offering recommendations based on the study. For policymakers and urban planners, she said resilience is formed by “a combination of good governance, security reform, and…inclusive urban planning.” Citing examples from Mexico City, Medellín, and elsewhere, Davis pointed to planning policies like mixed land use, greater pedestrian accessibility, and more parks and public spaces as ways that authorities could engender the kind of community pride so crucial to the development of positive urban resilience.
“[Focus on] generating vibrant public areas where people feel invested in protecting [them] and making them better,” she advised.
While many scholars have tended to look either at the state or local communities in isolation when considering violence and resilience, Davis argued that reducing violence was “a shared objective.” She thus stressed the importance of “co-production of security,” reiterating the overall notion that state and community actors need to work side-by-side in a form of what Davis and Tirman called “cooperative autonomy.”
In addition to Urban Resilience in Situations of Chronic Violence, Davis also authored the supplementary Toolkit for Urban Resilience in Situations of Chronic Violence. Both documents can be found on the MIT’s website. Davis and Tirman hope to add the seven individual case studies to the site soon.
Event Resources:Photo Credit: “Bogota at night,” courtesy of flickr user WanderingtheWorld (Christopher Schoenbohm); charts courtesy of Davis and Tirman.
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