Speaker
Description
Millions of people are displaced by natural disasters annually, and the economic impacts on communities can take years to recover. Engaging communities in disaster resilience is important to ensuring disaster-resilient planning achieves the best possible outcomes for the people and stakeholders impacted by disasters.
Engaging the people and communities impacted by disasters in the development and implementation of disaster response plans is not simply about developing better plans. It is also a key element for delivering robust and ongoing democratic practices outside. Considering community-led disaster planning from a democratic perspective recognises the value of giving people a sense of control over their lives, something that disasters generally take away.
Whilst there are multiple approaches to delivering community-led disaster planning, each approach should be chosen to appropriately respond to the nature of the disaster/s to be addressed, the experience with similar disasters, and the level of interest from communities and governments. The engagement strategy should also be informed by the urban scale of the community – for example, at the village-level, local community planning approaches such as asset-based community development can be very effective; at the town-level, design approaches such as human-centered design and co-design enable rich engagement; at the city-level, engaging expert facilitators to facilitate scenario planning can offer depth of engagement; and at the regional level, broader approaches that engage stakeholders in developing macro-level strategies are useful. At each level, there is value in incorporating ideas about ‘collaborative’ governance, whereby citizens and communities are considered equal partners in the development of disaster responses.
In this paper, we set out the crucial role that community engagement plays in ensuring that the values and expectations of the people affected by disasters are central to disaster-resilience and adaptation planning efforts. We then provide examples, at different urban scales, of how communities have been engaged and given the authority to lead the development of disaster adaptation planning. From the village-level, where communities were empowered to develop plans that they implement, to situations where designers work with communities to design effective disaster responses, to facilitators helping communities identify potential disaster scenarios and develop effective responses, to multi-faceted engagement with communities and stakeholders developing regional plans to support preparation for and responses to disaster events.
These examples demonstrate both the value of engaging with communities and the range of ways in which this engagement can be designed to focus on the needs of the communities, the nature of the disasters and threats confronting them, and to accommodate the broader governance arrangements in place.
| Keywords | climate change; climate security; community-led; action research; deliberative democracy; scenario |
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| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
