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

In the last 3 decades, millions of people in India have beenimpacted by floods, losing billions of dollars in damages.Structural and non-structural flood risk management measureshave been adopted abundantly. Yet the damage, althoughreduced, remains great. Any examination of flood riskmanagement, across a particular geography at any given time,needs to address questions of constraints and power dynamics,that inevitably characterise every decision by each stakeholderinvolved.

An examination of the highly flood-prone state ofKerala, with consecutive floods in the last five years, enablesidentification of intricate power relations among governments,scientific communities making recommendations, commerciallobbies, political and religious leaders, local influencers and flood-affected communities.

The research involves a qualitativemethodology with repeated data triangulation across differentsources and presents a vivid picture of how policyimplementation had been paralysed for years, with scientificrecommendations to government bodies being diluted anddevalued. To address the existing knowledge gap ofunderstanding decision-making in flood risk managementthrough contextualised power relations and constraints, ahybridisation of power theories and bounded rationality wasconducted, developing a framework of Power-BoundedRationality.

The paper identifies how the widely publicisednarratives on threatened local livelihoods led to institutionalinaction and ultimately, dilution and devaluation of scientificrecommendations, resulting in paralysis