Bargaining with Disaster: Flooding, Climate Change and Urban Growth Ambitions in Quy Nhon City, Vietnam

This article uses a problem-driven political economy approach to analyze Quy Nhon City’s ongoing attempts to pursue long-standing urban growth ambitions in the face of increasing awareness of climate threats. In spite of a recent history of multiple, catastrophic floods, the provincial Department of Construction (DOC) has proposed expanding the city’s boundaries into low-lying agricultural areas nearby. Based on past experience and projections of future climate change impacts, environmentalists in the provincial administration have opposed this move. Fuelling this conflict are incentives within Vietnam’s urban development and management system. Rather than respond to urban growth, these incentives are used to lead it. Thus, while climate vulnerability assessments have alerted city and provincial officials to potential dangers in their urban development strategy, incentives within the political-administrative system continue to pull them along a growth pathway that is likely to increase their vulnerability to climate change.   Monumental public works and citywide early warning systems mask increasing risks embedded in these urban growth priorities rather than resolve them. Getting the incentives right, therefore, becomes the key to improving resilience to climate change.

与灾害讨价还价： 越南归仁市的洪水泛滥、气候变化以及城市增长的雄心

关键词： 气候变化，政治经济学，越南，城市化。

本文使用了问题驱动的政治经济学方法，分析了归仁市如何在对气候带来的威胁认识日益加深的情况下 ，仍坚持实现其长期以来追求的城市增长雄心。尽管近期历史上就多次暴发洪水灾害，省建设部还是提出将城市边界拓宽到附近 地势低洼的农业区域。省政府中的环保主义者基于以往经验和对未来气候变化影响的预测，反对这个动议。越南城市发展和管理系统内部一些激励因素加剧了这个矛盾。这些动机并非对城市增长作出反应，相反，它们被利用来引领和驱动增长。因此，尽管气候脆弱性评价结论已经提醒了归仁市和省里的官员，他们的城市发展战略具有潜在的风险，但政治-行政系统中受这些动机驱动的官员仍继续沿着很可能增加受气候变化影响的脆弱性的增长路径来推行这些战略。规模宏大的公共工程和覆盖市区的早期预警系统并没有解决这些城市增长的优先项目中日益加深的风险，反而掩盖了它们。因此，矫正激励机制才是提高顺应气候变化能力的关键问题。

Translated from English by Li Guo