Planning for global environmental change in Bangkok's informal settlements

Government agencies in cities across Asia recognise that municipalities must take steps to adapt to projected climate changes if people and places are to be kept above water. This paper focuses on planning for climate change in Bangkok because it ranks among the top 10 port cities vulnerable to climate change related flooding. It is also understood that the most devastating impacts of climate change will be suffered by the city's most vulnerable residents: the poor. Not only do impoverished people occupy physically vulnerable space, such as riverbanks, but they are also the least equipped to recover from the disruption of their livelihoods.Several scholars have identified "institutional traps" that prevent the Thai government from successfully aiding poor and marginalised flood victims in the past. These include poor coordination, lack of monitoring and evaluation, rigidity, crisis management and elite capture. Lebel, Manuta, and Garden (2011, 56) pose the crucial question: "How have individuals - from local community leaders through to national level politicians and bureaucrats - successfully influenced policy and programmes to avoid institutional traps and improve adaptive capacities to climate change?"In this paper, we begin to address this question through examining emergent methods of "community based adaptation" and reviewing case studies of adaptation action from other vulnerable communities in the Global South. These lessons - such as overcoming institutional rigidity and avoiding elite capture - are important for Bangkok and other cities in the Global South that face many different challenges by global environmental change.