Workshop on Systems Thinking and Adaptive Governance: The Context of Urban Flooding and Water Stress in Bangalore

TERI SRC organized a workshop on "Systems Thinking and Adaptive Governance: The Context of Urban Flooding and Water Stress in Bangalore" on April 24-25, 2014. This workshop was supported by the Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research (APN) under its CAPABLE capacity-building programme.

The aim of this workshop was to create a greater appreciation of the principles of systems thinking and adaptive governance among government and non-government practitioners, and to discuss how these principles can be operationalized in the context of Bengaluru.

A similar workshop was organized in Assam in January also. It focussed on flooding in the upper Brahmaputra basin. For Bengaluru, the focus was on the issues of urban flooding and water stress. In Bengaluru, high intensity rainfall causes urban flooding due to inadequate drainage and unplanned development in lake beds and low-lying areas.

This two-day workshop had an interesting mix of expert presentations and group activities to introduce participants to systems thinking and adaptive governance in the context of Bengaluru. Participants used simple conceptual modelling techniques in groups to understand issues, such as urban flooding, water stress, and ecological degradation from different perspectives, factor in the challenges posed by uncertainty due to climate change, and strategize accordingly.

Participants included representatives of the Bangalore Metropolitan Region Development Authority (BMRDA), Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB), Central Ground Water Board (CGWB), Environmental Management and Policy Research Institute (EMPRI), Lake Development Authority (LDA), Administrative Training Institute (ATI), and State Institute for Urban Development (SIUD), Mysore. Various research and academic institutions, such as Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), and Azim Premji University, and many other civil society organizations, such as Environment Support Group (ESG) also took part in this workshop.