Assessing Flooding Experiences in the Ga South Municipality Using the Complexity Theory

Abstract

The current state-of-the-art in flood persistence and damage analysis mainly focuses on the economic evaluation of tangible flood effects, although prior studies have revealed that geo-hazards such as flooding have multiple causal agents. Thus, most flood protection policies have been technically focussed, at the expense of equally important social causal factors. This thesis contends that for a long time, socio-cultural aspects of flood-related vulnerabilities have been neglected. Nonetheless, studies have evidently highlighted the heterogeneity and interwoven nature of flooding agents, most of which have gained in importance due to expansive land use, rising damage potentials in floodplain areas, and increasing conflicts between socio-economic land use and flood protection. Borrowing from the complexity theory, the study questions the role of anthropogenic factors in explaining flood-risk vulnerabilities and experiences, and questions whether these factors represent a general tendency that might provide a dialectical basis for building community resilience, with a focus on Ga South Municipality as an exemplary case study. Given the widely-acknowledged flooding crisis in the study area and the commodification of land and property markets more generally, the urgency of addressing this issue is self-evident. The research adopts a case-study design approach, with mixed methods to address the lacunae. The findings reveal that both natural and anthropogenic factors are implicit in flood experiences, albeit the greatest culprits are the human-induced agents which have led to the siltation of the Densu River. These findings affirm the prevalence of contemporary urban land use (mis)management and the need for a commensurate political space for policy discourse, and they will enable and empower local authorities to hold public officers responsible for their actions and inactions—particularly regarding the enforcement of legislation in ecologically sensitive zones, including the Weija Dam green belt zone—to enhance the actual or the real resilience levels of flood victims.