Abstract
This paper aims to identify how targeted asset transfers help to build adaptive capacity and adaptive actions of the urban extreme poor to climate change phenomena. This paper explores the theoretical debates of community-based adaptation approach and failure of such approach to address urban extreme poor. The empirical evidence of these theoretical debates will be drawn from two informal settlements of Dhaka city, where a targeted asset transfer project has been implementing since 2009. This paper explains that urban extreme poor usually work as unskilled labour and lack different livelihood capitals; and climate change is an increasingly important influence exacerbating an already vulnerable livelihood context. There is growing recognition in the literature that poor urban people and communities are adapting to climate change in physical and behavioural terms. But, in the case of urban extreme poor these adaptation approaches are delivering short-term survival strategies disregarding the notion of wellbeing in the medium to long-term perspectives. It is also evident that community level initiatives structurally reproduce the exclusion of the urban extreme poor. However, poverty literatures acknowledge that poverty-centred approaches could help to reduce vulnerability. As urban extreme poor are significantly more resource constrained, it is reasonable to assert that targeted asset transfers could be a poverty-centred adaptation approach in a changing climate. Targeted asset transfers approaches are the outcomes of recent social protection revolution that especially consider accumulation of physical, financial, human, and social capital in order to build adaptive capacity of the urban extreme poor. This adaptive capacity of the extreme poor may facilitate adjustments in assets, livelihoods, behaviours, and technologies in order to reduce future climate vulnerability. In this context, this paper seeks to answer whether targeted asset transfer approaches can be considered as effective poverty-centred adaptation approaches for the urban extreme poor or not.
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Source Adapted and modified from Ahammad (2011)
Source Author (2014)
Source Author’s Field Survey (2014); the figure adapted from (Hashemi and Umaira 2011)
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In Karail, the local government (Dhaka City Corporation) in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme and Local Government Engineering Department (LGED) have been implementing the Urban Partnerships for Poverty Reduction Programme (UPPRP) since 2009 where the extreme poor households are supported with social protection as well as community-based measures; and in Kamrangirchar, the civil society organisation—Dushtha Shasthya Kendra (DSK) has been implementing an ‘asset transfer’ project for the last 3 years, which is part of the national extreme poverty reduction programme jointly implemented by the Shiree (Stimulating Household Improvements Resulting in Economic Empowerment) and Bangladesh government.
It is a non-random-(non-probability)based sampling technique where the sample is selected based on the administrator’s preconceived knowledge on the sampling units (e.g. households) (Zikmund 2003).
Triangulation is defined as “comparing different kinds of data (quantitative and qualitative) and different methods (observation and interviews) to see whether they corroborate one another. This form of comparison, called triangulation, derives from navigation, where different bearings give the correct position of an object” (Silverman 2000, p. 156).
The Urban Partnerships for Poverty Reduction (UPPR) Programme follows the ‘community-based/driven approach’ of poverty reduction and slum upgrading where the extreme poor households were supported by social protection (fixed cash transfer). On the other hand, the DSK-Shiree project focuses on the ‘asset transfer’ model to support the extreme poor households.
Revolving funds is one of the unique strategies of the project. Fund recovery is applicable for startup capital along with a 10% service charge, sales of medicines on 50% subsidised cost, cost of sanitary latrines and water points along with service charges from 0% to 10% based on the economic status of the house owners.
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Zakir Hossain, M., Ashiq Ur Rahman, M. Adaptation to climate change as resilience for urban extreme poor: lessons learned from targeted asset transfers programmes in Dhaka city of Bangladesh. Environ Dev Sustain 20, 407–432 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-016-9888-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-016-9888-2