Urban Governance of Flooding in Myanmar: A Case Study of Bago

Abstract

Urban flooding poses significant challenges to cities in Southeast Asia including loss of life, human displacement, and damaged infrastructure. As cities in the region grow and as the effects of climate change worsen, urban flooding is becoming more frequent and severe. This research situates flood governance in Bago City, Myanmar, in the literature on environmental governance and urban political ecology, investigating how local governance actors interpret the significance of flooding and how they promote urban climate governance. Using the 2015 Bago floods as a point of entry, results were derived from semi-structured interviews with (10) government officials and (22) key informants. Broadly, this research found that government officials interpreted the 2015 floods as extreme but also as an example of the government’s increasing capacity to respond to disasters, that local and regional governments lack the human and capital resources to take on the greater responsibility for flood management that they wish to, that government often fails to act on their knowledge about external causes of flooding such as land use and climate changes, and that government officials strategically adopt neoliberal paradigms advanced by international networks while reinterpreting them to advance their own goals of expanding the role of the state.