| dc.description.abstract | Climate change and extreme events brought about by it increasingly threaten an urbanising humanity and imposes the need for adapting to arising challenges and mitigate further climate change due to the limitations of adaptation. Climate action, with many activities depending on behavioural changes, should be centred around people’s lives and aspirations for a desirable future to let people identify with these measures and thus let them become part of desired futures, which will be certainly shaped by climate change. One way to elicit such desired futures is to focus on people’s narratives, which are in principal stories and shared realities that bind people together, foster interaction among them, and let people make sense of the world they live in as narratives organize their experiences. Narratives unfold around key events, actors, activities, relations between them as well as embeddedness in time and space and are therefore holding crucial implications for future-proofing a place.
Studying narratives within a case study in Dordrecht, an island in the South-Western Dutch Delta, involved authorities and citizens eliciting their narratives around weather and water affecting the city. This research unearthed nine main narrative themes shedding light on the historical struggle of the city with water that is shaping its fate until today. Exposure to water and weather causing threats for Dordrecht that are increasing in their severity due to climate change related extremes and sea-level rise, as well as the vision for a climate resilient and safe future become obvious in the elicited narratives.
This study let both shared and diverging stories among authorities and citizens appear, with the shared underlying motivator of climate change employing a climate threat frame being critical for climate-proofing Dordrecht. Shared narratives involve historical struggles, outlooks for the future as well as both constraints and drivers for collective problem solving. Diverging narratives state specificities of threats and occurring measures to deal with them. Involved authorities are focusing more on water management and detailed strategies to deal with vulnerabilities arising out of climate change and its impacts, whereas inhabitants narrate more holistically on their experiences with weather, water, and mitigating climate change in order to safeguard the future of Dordrecht and its inhabitants. Finally, elicited narratives imply the need for actively involving authorities and citizens in collaborative governance arrangements focusing simultaneously on climate adaptation and climate mitigation to bridge the elicited divergence in this endeavour and act on anthropogenic climate change. | |
