Adaptation to climate change as resilience for urban extreme poor: lessons learned from targeted asset transfers programmes in Dhaka city of Bangladesh

This paper aims to identify how targeted asset transfers help to build adaptive capacity and adaptive actions of the urban extreme poor to climate change phenomena. This paper explores the theoretical debates of community-based adaptation approach and failure of such approach to address urban extreme poor. The empirical evidence of these theoretical debates will be drawn from two informal settlements of Dhaka city, where a targeted asset transfer project has been implementing since 2009. This paper explains that urban extreme poor usually work as unskilled labour and lack different livelihood capitals; and climate change is an increasingly important influence exacerbating an already vulnerable livelihood context. There is growing recognition in the literature that poor urban people and communities are adapting to climate change in physical and behavioural terms. But, in the case of urban extreme poor these adaptation approaches are delivering short-term survival strategies disregarding the notion of wellbeing in the medium to long-term perspectives. It is also evident that community level initiatives structurally reproduce the exclusion of the urban extreme poor. However, poverty literatures acknowledge that poverty-centred approaches could help to reduce vulnerability. As urban extreme poor are significantly more resource constrained, it is reasonable to assert that targeted asset transfers could be a poverty-centred adaptation approach in a changing climate. Targeted asset transfers approaches are the outcomes of recent social protection revolution that especially consider accumulation of physical, financial, human, and social capital in order to build adaptive capacity of the urban extreme poor. This adaptive capacity of the extreme poor may facilitate adjustments in assets, livelihoods, behaviours, and technologies in order to reduce future climate vulnerability. In this context, this paper seeks to answer whether targeted asset transfer approaches can be considered as effective poverty-centred adaptation approaches for the urban extreme poor or not.