Participatory and Multi-Governance Approaches for Urban Resilience: Practice or Rhetoric in Malawi?

Good Governance at the national and sub-national level is critical for effective and equitable resilience and adaptation planning. Inadequate capacity and will among local governments in Malawi to respond to urban disasters leads to huge deficits in service and infrastructure provision, which drives up risk. Multilevel governance frameworks provide a starting point for understanding how central and local governments and other public and private actors in Malawi
interface to design and implement policies and strategies from international to national and local levels of action. The recurring flooding in Malawi cities represent both challenge and opportunity for climate change policy and strategies for urban resilience. In view of the challenges posed by rapid urbanization
and climate change related risks which challenge the weak institutional and financial situation in cities of Malawi, the National Resilience Strategy (NRS) 2018-2030 recognizes that effective participatory and multi-level governance approaches can play a critical role in shaping the future trends. The growing
concentration of population, socio-economic activity, poverty and infrastructure in urban areas against urban land use provisions translates into particular vulnerability to increased hazards. City governments and urban stakeholders are therefore essential in the design and delivery of cost-effective adaptation policies and strategies for enhanced resilience. The paper questions the resource mobilization at grassroots level and coordination of efforts at different levels aimed at promoting implementation of the NRS, accelerate policy responses that engage the multiplicity of stakeholders in land governance and infrastructure planning as part of the process to build urban resilience in Malawi.