Participatory planning and filmmaking for urban climate resilience in Blantyre City, Malawi

This study investigates the role of participatory video in urban planning for climate resilience and risk reduction in a peri-urban area of Blantyre City in Malawi. It examines participation dynamics and participants’ experiences within ​the ​filmmaking process, encompassing planning, design, production, content creation, and dissemination. Using interviews, focus group discussions, participant observation, evaluation, questionnaires and the filmmaking process as data collection methods, the study argues that participatory video has the potential to enhance urban climate resilience and risk reduction.

The PV process amplified participants’ voices about urban risk and vulnerabilities both within and beyond the community, raised awareness about disaster risk reduction, facilitated bottom-up risk information sharing and fostered dialogue, although the process was fraught with barriers due to the nature of participation as a double-edged sword. The challenges of participation manifested through donor logic, elite control, power dynamics, epistemic politics, as well as its limited impact on policy change. These limitations of PV highlight a disconnect between epistemic legitimacy and decision-making authority, something that has implications for practitioners, policymakers and researchers in participatory video, participatory planning, disaster risk reduction and urban climate resilience. The study therefore contributes to the body of knowledge on epistemic legitimacy, distributive and procedural justice, and representational discourses within the context of disaster risk reduction and urban climate resilience.