Disparities in the implementation gap: adaptation to flood risk in the Densu Delta, Accra, Ghana

ABSTRACT

While the need for adaptation in response to the effects of global environmental change impacts in cities has been widely recognised, implementation of appropriate strategies and measures to curb them remains a challenge. In the Densu Delta, west of Accra, multiple phenomena of global environmental change interact together, making adaptation a key strategy for dealing with the increased risk of urban flooding. Implementation of existing policies, however, is scarce. Here we analyse policy arguments concerning strategies to reduce and adapt to urban flooding in key policy documents and contrast them with practitioners’ experiences of implementation in the Densu Delta. Two general mismatches in argumentation are identified that reflect the implementation gap in adaptation to flooding in the Densu Delta. These are a disconnected presentation of the causes, consequences and strategies in policy arguments, and the concealing of undisclosed premises. Undisclosed premises are shown not to speak to the conditions of implementation practice. Consequences for overcoming the implementation gaps are sketched out. The paper contributes to understanding of the implementation gap in adaptation to urban flood risk by applying a lens of argument to environmental policy analysis in an African context.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban disaster risk
• environmental policy discourse
• implementation gap
• local knowledge and practices

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Samuel Agyei-Mensah, Chris Gordon, Ernest Olertey, Martin Oteng-Ababio, Kofi Owusu and Mark Pelling for their advice and/or support of the research in Accra. The authors would in particular like to thank Peter Feindt, Sebastian Mehling, three anonymous reviewers and the participants at the ‘Discourse, Power and Environmental Policy’ workshop in Freiburg for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Fanny Frick-Trzebitzky, undertakes a joint PhD between the Departments of Geography at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and King’s College London. Her research on urban flood riskscapes in Accra, Ghana is part of the junior research group, WaterPower – The collision of mega-trends in a West African coastal city based at Trier University. Fanny is a member of the Transformation Research Cluster at the Heinrich Böll foundation, and of the Graduate Program at the Integrative Research Institute on Transformation of Human-Environment Systems (THESys) at Humboldt-Universität. Her research interests are urban planning and governance, adaptation to climate change and transformation research.

Antje Bruns, trained as geographer (PhD Kiel), her work examines political dimensions of environmental and resource governance in the context of climate change response. Antje is holding a full professorship for Sustainable Development and Governance at Trier University where she is head of the research project WaterPower. Before, she was assistant professor at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and a member in the Integrative Research Institute on Transformation of Human-Environment Systems (THESys).

Notes

1 See supplemental material for a visualisation of the structure of practical reasoning.

2 A note of caution: the analysis of arguments in formal policy documents looks at the outcome of argumentation only and does not show who is engaged in argumentation in what way. Consequently only dominant arguments are revealed.

3 The full list of statements is presented in the supplemental material.

Additional information

Funding

This research has been partly funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) under the (project funding) reference number 01 LN 1316 A and by the Heinrich-Böll-Foundation under the funding reference number P105800.