Urban flood and effective management strategies
- Part 2 -

Bhavananda Mayengbam *

Heavy flooding in and around Imphal on March 31 2017 :: Pix - Shankar Khangembam

Aside from technical inputs water management requires trained managers and empowered institutions. Institutional capacity building aims at enhancement of knowledge on water management involving innovative best practices and new approaches to development planning. The main objective in change of planning and capacity building is to review the changes, examine the demand made on staff, highlight the implication for capacity building and change in management practice. Change in management practice requires sectorial and departmental decentralisation and prioritize on task oriented team.

Further, it also requires a change in perception and to develop partnership approach with CBOs, NGOs, and private sector. Change in concept requires a change towards new public management. If the change is welcome, what we value is secured and provides what we want, on the contrary, if the change is resisted, it deprives what we value and prevents achievement of what we seek.

Institutions are managed by teams and require creation of team spirit and personal change to implement new ideas and subsequently it also requires a personal planning for change. For this, we need to plan ourselves before we plan our infrastructures. This requires motivated individuals/teams that are capable to accept new techniques of problem solving and creative planning, new participative planning approaches, ability to work in interdepartmental teams and manage partnership with various stakeholders outside government.

At the institutional level, the capacity building will ensure the capability to operate with task and client oriented approach, decentralised decision making, ability work in partnership within the department or with other organisations and ability to move from blueprint form to working form.

In the decision making and policy formation stage, the involvement of stakeholders not only helps in understanding the cause of the problem but also ensures success in implementation. Policy paralysis is one of the major problems in our state and why it remains inevitable, leads to a number of preliminary themes.

A policy is basically a statement which incorporates goal, objectives, and strategies and further indicates a direction to solve a problem through various policy instruments. Therefore, formation of goal, objective, and strategies requires correct identification of real cause and subsequent embracement of suitable policy instruments based on situation and local conditions.

The roles of policy instruments are to ensure the implementation of a policy and try to change people's behaviour towards the direction of the policy. Moreover, what exactly are the policy instruments and why we need them, further lead to numerous agendas.

For example, why we require instruments for flood management policy when integrated policies with specific instruments can cover all issues? Can we really overcome all problems only with specific instruments in terms of implementation mechanism, sanction mechanism or working mechanism? Why we place instruments in administrative setting to emphasise on horizontal governance and why we need them?

The answer primarily lies to simplification and inclusion in social fabrics for safeguard and prolonged sustainability. As policy instruments are structured set of activities meant for executing a policy, they aim at changing several activities in the society towards the policy goals. They enable change in behaviour compare to the behaviour without the application of the instruments.

For instance, to discourage wrong parking by motorist, parking areas are set or defined; here regulation is used as policy instrument. Subsequently, imposing fine on those who break the regulation is an example that deploys economic instruments.

Further, campaigns, publicity, inclusion in educational syllabus etc. to encourage the motorist to comply are information/ persuasion instruments. Further, a combination of various instruments can be also used to achieve the mission.

Numerous polices are framed to address social, economic and environmental issues. Nevertheless, many of them have failed to address pressing current urban issues mainly due to ineffective implementation mechanism and absence of evaluation mechanism. Recognising roles of stakeholders are of utmost importance in a policy, however, this may not hold true in many cases.

One of the major reasons behind the failure of a policy is due to lack of stakeholder participation in policy formation. After all, stakeholders are the ones who are going to be directly or indirectly affected by the policy and its success lies in their active participation.

To address the urban flood, we require effective water management policy encompassing suitable policy instruments/ tools for implementation and subsequent evaluation process to identify backlogs. The reason behind the essence of urban flood policy instrument is to overcome the complexity in empirical relations, and the complexity in assessment. Having familiar instruments from past experience makes policies more predictive and adaptive in implementation.

Consequently, if this adaptive mechanism adopted by affected community is structured in a stable pattern, they can be assumed as a part of policy instrumentation and can be used in the policy formation and decision making. Further, evaluation process involving stakeholders helps to identify the ineffective areas of the policy thereby giving a fair chance to initiate corrective measures. The absence of this process is also one of the major reasons behind many failures.

Lastly, we need to relook at our present flood management policy and identify the cause rather than to address the effects and use suitable policy instruments to change the behaviour of the society towards the policy goals. Mapping and study of present urban drainage in context with historical maps and data are essential to explore the cause.

To mitigate urban flood, it is also required to clean and deepen the drain and river beds in collaboration with historical data and strengthen the weak embankments. Capacity building of our institutions along with recognition of stakeholder participation in flood policy decision making process will eradicate difficulties in policy formation, implementation, monitoring and evaluation. Enactment of proper regulations and laws, use of economic and social instruments etc. to stop solid waste disposal and encroachment on drainage and wetlands should be our prerogative strategies.

Further, there is also a strong need to study the amount of water supply to the city either by piped water or through small water enterprises. As sanitation starts from where water supply ends, the empirical data collected can be used collectively with flood data to improve and plan a sustainable drainage system for Imphal.

Concluded ...