Inexistent Floods

: Assembling Floods in the Riparian Squatter Settlements of the Kathmandu Valley

Abstract

Within disaster studies, disasters such as floods are usually examined through two dominant paradigms: the hazard paradigm and the vulnerability paradigm. While this division has been analytically useful, especially in repositioning disaster causality within social processes, it can be inadequate when applied to context-specific cases. The annually recurring floods in riparian squatter settlements of the Kathmandu Valley exemplify this limitation. These annually recurring floods, which persist without mitigation from the state or the residents, challenge conventional definitions of what qualifies as a disaster, what constitutes flood risk, and what it means to be vulnerable.
Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork in the riparian squatter settlements of Kathmandu Valley and informed by Assemblage Theory, this study argues that the analytic separation between hazard and vulnerability collapses when they are examined as part of unfolding, situated processes. Disasters are not discrete events but continuous, emergent phenomena, where the biophysical and the social are continuously assembled. Such context challenges the conventional conceptualisation of vulnerability tied to a representational and structuralist ontology that risks reifying vulnerability as a condition fixed in space or attached to specific social categories. Following a process ontological approach of Assemblage Theory, the study reconceptualises vulnerability as a process of becoming, neither fixed nor predictable, but constituted through contingent socio-material arrangements and everyday negotiations. It is understood relationally and dynamically, produced through shifting interaction between people, environments, infrastructures, and institutions. Who becomes vulnerable is contingent upon unfolding, contested, and multiple futures in the riparian geography of Kathmandu valley, shaped through both structural conditions and everyday negotiations. Similarly, the concept of risk, often treated as a stable category in academia and policy discourses, is revealed to be unstable and contingent, co-constituted through practice, anticipation, and contestation by both the residents of the squatter settlement and urban and DRR practitioners.
In rethinking these concepts, the thesis contributes to the emerging conversation on the processual and relational nature of disasters, arguing that disasters are always-in-the-making, relational processes, shaped by situated territorial dynamics. By situating these dynamics in Kathmandu’s riparian settlements, the study offers an expansion of current theorisation of disaster, vulnerability, and risk as dynamic, emergent and contested processes. Practically, this reconceptualisation calls for a more adaptive, situated, and process-oriented approach to understanding disaster and disaster governance.

Date of Award	20 Jan 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Ryerson B Christie (Supervisor) & Ashley H Dodsworth (Supervisor)