Urban informal settlements in Africa: transforming adaptation governance

International bodies, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are increasingly considering adaptation efforts in urban informal settlements in their core agendas. Although urban informal settlements serve as sites for seeding and scaling locally led initiatives, existing literature sometimes overlooks the intersection of climatic and non-climatic governance risks when exploring transformative adaptation pathways. A systematic review of the scientific literature addresses four lines of questioning: what actions are taken to confront flood-related risks in African urban informal settlements? Who are the salient actors across different scales, and how are they empowered to act? What forms of climatic and non-climatic governance risks emerge and intersect because of the actions taken? What shifts in actor collaborations are unfolding and pertinent with potential to transform adaptation governance from the local to the global level?

POLICY RELEVANCE

Adaptation governance reform processes – whether legal, technological, social, economic, environmental or institutional – ought to consider both the scalability and the unique governance risks of initiatives emanating from urban informal settlements. Community-led waste recovery and recycling initiatives demonstrate this complexity. These initiatives simultaneously reduce emissions, create clean urban spaces, boost household incomes and mitigate waterborne health risks during floods. However, scaling these co-benefits requires governance frameworks that not only couple climate mitigation with adaptation but also enable cohesion between top-down government strategies and bottom-up community efforts to minimise elite capture and vested interest groups from dominating public participation. This ensures that responses shift from prioritising short-term relief to building cross-sector coalitions that can translate promising practices into structured, long-term action.