Power, paralysis and action: understanding flood risk management in Kerala, India

Abstract

In the last 3 decades, millions of people in India have been impacted by floods, losing billions of dollars in damages. Structural and non-structural flood risk management measures have been adopted abundantly. Yet the damage, although reduced, remains great. Any examination of flood risk management, across a particular geography at any given time, needs to address questions of constraints and power dynamics, that inevitably characterise every decision by each stakeholder involved. An examination of the highly flood-prone state of Kerala, with consecutive floods in the last five years, enables identification of intricate power relations among governments, scientific communities making recommendations, commercial lobbies, political and religious leaders, local influencers and flood-affected communities. The research involves a qualitative methodology with repeated data triangulation across different sources and presents a vivid picture of how policy implementation had been paralysed for years, with scientific recommendations to government bodies being diluted and devalued. To address the existing knowledge gap of understanding decision-making in flood risk management through contextualised power relations and constraints, a hybridisation of power theories and bounded rationality was conducted, developing a framework of Power-Bounded Rationality. The paper identifies how the widely publicised narratives on threatened local livelihoods led to institutional inaction and ultimately, dilution and devaluation of scientific recommendations, resulting in paralysis.