This article, written by TERI, of the Asian City Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN), reviews the ways in which seven of the programme’s Indian cities prepared climate resilience strategies. It notes how the policy-making context in India proves highly challenging for stakeholders trying to integrate resilience planning into policy across government. The need for, local, cross-department coordination is hampered in the context of national and state-led policies and budgetary allocations, and competing sectoral interests. It highlights how the ACCCRN has worked with 10 Asian cities to institutionalise urban climate resilience through participatory planning with city government, private sector and citizen stakeholders. The ACCCRN aims to expand the network to new regions, hence this paper aims to identity potential replication opportunities from the cities’ methodologies and processes, as well as identify challenges, gaps, and opportunities. This article focuses on the experiences in seven Indian cities: Surat, Indore, Guwahati, Bhubaneswar, Gorakhpur, Mysore and Shimla.

The methodologies differed to some extent due to contextual differences related to socio-political and geographic factors, stakeholder relationships, qualitative and quantitative skills, availability of existing data and time frames. Nevertheless, some common features were prerequisites for resilience-building: i) risk assessments including climate projections, sectoral analysis, vulnerability assessments and, ii) city resilience studies to identify a framework of strategies for building resilience and reducing vulnerabilities, including sectors for intervention and pilot projects. In order to promote successful replication, the authors highlight a range of necessary steps, including: capacity-building in the methodologies across stakeholders, institutionalisation of the resilience-building process at city-level through cross-department coordinating bodies, and policy and implementation support from state or national governments.