The Political Economy of Resilience: National Roundtables for Istanbul 2026

Duryog Nivaran (DN) , the South Asia Network for Disaster Risk Reduction, is a member of the organising committee drawn from the Women and Gender Stakeholder Group (WGSG) of the UNDRR for the upcoming conference Reimagining Resilience: Collective Futures for Disaster Risk Reduction – From risk to justice and collective survival, scheduled to take place in early November in Istanbul, Turkey.

In preparation for the conference, and recognising that the limited number of participants (capped at 100) and the expenses associated with participating in-person in Istanbul will exclude the attendance of a number of people, DN is aiming to conduct a few discussions with activists, researchers and others at the national level that can then be fed into the conference discussions.

In particular, DN is keen to ensure that the conversations in Istanbul will be grounded in the political economy of disaster risk reduction, which is the root cause of increasing vulnerability of people to extreme weather conditions.

DN will partner with the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies (BCIS) to facilitate these discussions. The discussions will take place on the 15th and 29th October 2026. They will be organised as roundtables led by some key speakers (online or hybrid — with the physical meeting at the BCIS). The discussions will seek to unpack concepts like ‘resilience’, ‘collective survival’ and ask the difficult political questions: what does resilience mean for different people, or is survival the goal or something more?

Discussion 1: Patriarchy and Inequality (October 15)

Patriarchy determines who can move, who can decide, and who absorbs the shock. Restricted mobility, unpaid care burdens that intensify precisely when services collapse, exclusion from land titles and credit that block recovery, and violence that rises in displacement settings – are the reason a hazard becomes catastrophic for some and survivable for others. Further, women are consistently first responders yet consistently absent from the rooms where preparedness budgets are set.

Inequality governs the distribution of everything above: exposure, protection, recovery, and voice. Low-income neighborhoods, informal settlement residents, outdoor workers, persons with disabilities, older persons, minoritized communities and migrants face heightened exposure and reduced capacity to recover, because inequality is what determines whose safety is treated as infrastructure and whose is treated as charity.

Register Here to the Discussion

Discussion 2: Debt and Austerity, Extractivism (October 29)

Debt and austerity hollow out the state’s capacity to protect before the hazard arrives. Sovereign debt service consumes the fiscal space that would fund health systems, early warning infrastructure, just transition and social protection. Conditionalities attached to lending have historically demanded exactly the cuts — to public health, to subsidies, to public sector employment — that convert a shock into a collapse. Post-disaster, reconstruction is financed by more debt, deepening the cycle. The gendered incidence of austerity is well documented: cuts to public services transfer labour directly onto women’s unpaid time and women bear the biggest brunt of the climate crisis.

Extractivist economic practices contribute directly to creating hazards. Deforestation, mining, quarrying, river diversion, mangrove clearance, and fossil fuel expansion in the name of ‘development’ and ‘economic growth’ produce the landslides, floods, and heat that are then narrated as natural events. Extraction concentrates profit externally and risk locally, and the communities resisting it are either captured through false promises, bribery and corruption or face criminalisation and violence.

Register Here to the Discussion