Participation, social capital and vulnerability to urban flooding in Guyana

The tension between international agencies, national and local institutions of the Global South has received much recent attention. This paper contributes to the debate by contrasting contemporary participatory models of management for the built environment with local experience of social capacity building and vulnerability to local flooding. It draws on field data collected in 1995–96 and is set within the contexts of recent structural adjustment and democratisation in Guyana. Identified vulnerabilities to flood hazard reveal that social and political assets play key roles in shaping access to local, national and international resources for environmental management. Despite recent structural reforms, and a rhetoric of participatory democracy, it is found that marginalized groups with limited social resources (women, children, the aged, the economically poor, petty-agriculturalists and squatters) continue to be excluded from local participatory decision-making in environmental management, and that the top-down construction of community has enabled local and national political elites to capture institutional structures designed to facilitate local empowerment and sustainable environmental management in coastal Guyana. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.