Towards transformative adaptation: experimenting participatory backcasting in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania)

This contribution focuses on climate change adaptation in urban context, which is currently a relevant challenge and a field of growing interest for urban and environmental planners. By assuming that adaptation planning should not seek exclusively to reduce the potential impacts of climate change, but should also identify transformative social projects oriented to sustainability, it is recognized the limitations of the classical forecasting approach for local adaptation planning (mostly used for risk/impact studies), as it is primarily oriented towards the conservation of the status quo, and unable to fully recognize the contextual mechanisms that determine people’s vulnerability trajectories. Following this perspective, this contribution sustains that the need for a transformative adaptation requires the enlargement and diversification of the knowledge base with which planners face uncertainty and system complexity, and the experimentation of alternative approaches that support a proactive attitude against social drivers of vulnerability and towards achieving desired futures rather than probable ones. The argument is illustrated through a case study on access to water in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), where, by flipping the usual perspective on planning (from forecasting to backcasting) and promoting participation throughout the entire process (by using the Theatre of the Oppressed as a method of participation), a critical approach to adaptation planning is outlined and experimented with a coastal community. The contribution describes the developed experiment and analyses the transformative potential of backcasting with respect to the different problem representation (and resulting actions) it brings out, and to the transformative elements it seeks to introduce in the process, namely community vision , social learning, and empowerment. The experiment raises some questions regarding the way in which this type of approach can be effectively integrated into centralized institutional decisionmaking systems like Tanzania’s.