Assessing social contracts for climate change adaptation through social listening on Twitter: general considerations and urban application

Adapting to climate change impacts requires a coherent social contract in which different actors agree on a clear distribution of roles and responsibilities. It is hence important to understand what roles and responsibilities different actors in a city or other social system expect and how they negotiate to ultimately arrive at a shared vision for a coherent social contract on adaptation for the coming decades. An urgent requirement is to understand the imagined social contracts on expected roles and responsibilities, which is particularly relevant in cities where very diverse social groups come together. However, there is limited empirical evidence on these expectations as they are often tacit and hard to capture across large populations and heterogeneous groups. Here using the concept of social listening in combination with Twitter data we assess the social contract on flood risk management in Mumbai. Social media data offer a new data source to inductively capture and assess the exchange and negotiations of roles and responsibilities of different actors such as public sector, citizens, civil society and private sector, including nuanced sentiments and opinions. In order to understand the imagined social contracts by different actors in Mumbai, we captured all flood risk related tweets over the monsoon season of 2021 (~70,000 tweets). We collected data through specific hashtag and keyword combinations. We manually coded the tweets in order to show the major themes in the dominant debate on flood risk management and filtered the most relevant tweets for the social contract analysis. The tweets were subsequently coded and analysed more comprehensively (e.g. for underlying sentiments).

Overall, our results show that there are gaps in the social contract on flood risk management in Mumbai on two levels: first, between different social contracts such as the practiced and imagined or the legal-institutional and imagined and, second, between different imagined social contracts. On the former, we found a large gap between the aspirational and realistic levels of expectations from the public sector. On the latter, we found surprisingly stark contestations regarding the roles and responsibilities towards the poor and most vulnerable populations living in informal and highly flood-prone settlements. Sentiments such as frustration and apathy expressed in tweets explain these gaps and highlight the need to build trust for achieving accepted and effective social contracts for adaptation. The results suggest that laying open these gaps is a necessary first step towards closing them and building a coherent future social contract. Twitter is an upcoming arena to negotiate and express opinions between different actors and hence, an important empirical database for analysing evolving social contracts. We suggest that such social listening approaches using Twitter or other platforms of active exchange can be of great relevance in high-risk contexts, including urban areas, across the globe in which different actors are faced with a high adaptation pressure and diverse competing, or even conflicting perspectives but currently lack a clear and agreed strategy or even vision to jointly move adaptation forward.