ABSTRACT
During the 2018 Kerala floods, the Kuttanad region was one of the worst-hit because of its peculiar topography. Large engineering structures for water control were built after the 1950s to facilitate rice cultivation, and later development interventions like roads altered the hydrology and seriously affected the system’s ability to cope with flash floods. The local adaptation knowledge has been slowly replaced by knowledge borne out of top-down, managerial, and command and control-driven approaches to managing floods. With the help of an empirical study, the paper demonstrates the possibility of localizing scientific knowledge and integrating it with local knowledge through deliberative platforms for flood risk planning at the Panchayat level. Local and participatory exploration of perceptions about floods and vulnerability integrated with scientific techniques of remote sensing, GIS, and flood zone mapping, was undertaken. The bottom-up knowledge creation through community participation in the flood risk planning at the Panchayat level paves the way to integrate complex and contested realities of privileged and marginal epistemic groups and knowledge systems.
