Uncertainty in Climate Vulnerability and Risk. Lessons from Interdisciplinary Sociological Research

Many different approaches exist in the theoretical and practical literature on the analytic (“is”) and normative (“ought”) dimensions of urban sustainability and resilience. This presentation draws on prior sociological and interdisciplinary work in cities from the Americas and Southeast Asia, to reflect on the policy implications of one dimension of uncertainty: ambiguity. What we know depends fundamentally on what questions we ask and how we go about answering those questions, based on the kinds of methods and data we decide to use or have available to us. For instance, many studies on health risks in cities, apply an epidemiological approach that, while important to examining health outcomes, tends to ignore the influence of behavioral and institutional factors, and produces a set of explanatory variables that are tightly constrained by the availability of data, particularly in developing countries. These studies omit any attempt to gain ethnographic knowledge of behavioral norms, social networks and risk perceptions that are equally relevant to understanding both inequality in urban populations’ vulnerability and populations’ agency. Policy makers often pick up on this dominant thread, resulting in policies that ignore behavior and other social factors that can influence the success or failure of their policies.