Towards building long term urban resilience: learnings from Nepal

This policy brief provides recommendations for building long term urban resilience by leveraging existing domestic institutional frameworks, facilitating collaborations across governance levels and co-produced, evidence-based, decision-making. This brief is developed as part of, and contributes to, the overarching research conducted through the Tomorrow’s Cities Hub, which engages with cities of the Global South to reduce disaster risk for the poor and marginalised communities in future cities.

In the face of rapid urbanization and increasing climate induced disasters and other natural hazards this policy brief provides an overview of some of the governance barriers and enabling mechanisms to support future urban planning strategies in Nepal. Poor policy implementation, technical inadequacies, fragmented decision making, and imbalance of priorities were highlighted as key governance challenges by representatives of various ministries of Nepal. Enabling mechanisms to build long term urban resilience were identified by community members of Khokana, representatives of the Lalitpur Metropolitan City (LMC), and national level policymakers. These include urban planning led by municipal governments, collaborations among governmental and non-governmental stakeholders, building technical capacity and communication strategies of national and local governments, effective management of disaster related information and redesigning existing policy frameworks making them more holistic. Furthermore, based on our observation’s relevant domestic non-governmental actors such as research organisations, civil societies and media should actively engage with future urban planning processes.