Citizen participation, community resilience and crisis-management policy

Towards people-centred approaches for effective disaster risk management: Balancing rhetoric with reality

“…However, as illustrated by the case in Section 4.2, residents often do not feel involved in the processes of risk management, do not adopt precautionary measures to protect their households, and prefer to defer to the 'authority in charge' model of responsibility. Whether this is because individuals are unable to take the opportunities they are given by authorities, or whether authorities devolve power, but can never relinquish it such that individuals become sufficiently empowered (to participate effectively) is unclear: both are probably true [38]. While a new conception of responsibility sharing seems already relatively well established among the international and scientific community, and is widely advocated by policy makers, among the population-at-risk, more traditional assumptions about responsibility allocation seem to predominate.…”

Community participation and local governance in Bangladesh

“…Therefore, academics, IDAs and civil society groups have called for greater community participation in local government development activities (Gaventa 2004;Holzer and Kloby 2005). Some researchers consider direct community participation as contradictory to the norms of democratic governance (Barten et al 2002;John 2009), but several studies have found such positioning unfounded (Holzer and Kloby 2005;Stark and Taylor 2014). Research conducted by Holzer and Kloby (2005) on school budgeting and education policy in the USA has revealed that direct public participation in locallevel governance is useful in designing relevant policies and reducing costs.…”

European Civil Security Governance

“…The need to plan for and respond to natural hazard events with an approach that draws on society-wide distribution of hazard prevention and mitigation activities at once recognizes the diminishing capacity of technical natural hazard management processes (Alexander, 2008;Bulley, 2013;Welsh, 2014), but also the necessity to share an increasing hazard mitigation burden across all members of at-risk societies, especially if antecedent natural hazard vulnerabilities within society are to be addressed rather than attempting to prevent hazards. While the rhetoric of devolution in government 'commandand-control' powers of natural hazard managers seems a clear policy directive, critical authors recognize that this element in a prospective security transformation towards resilience still faces practical hurdles (Stark and Taylor, 2014). Thirdly, while Stallings and Quarantelli (1985) were surprised by the public's interest in becoming involved in natural hazard mitigation decisions pre-1970, emergent hazard mitigation behaviour among atrisk populations is now very common and encouraged (Adger, 2003;Morrison, 2003;Bihari and Ryan, 2012;Prior and Eriksen, 2013).…”

“…2 In particular, uncertainty and unpredictability influence the technical capacity to determine event probabilities of future events (Dessai and Hulme, 2004), the fundamental linchpin on which modern technical natural hazard management is founded (Lopes, 1987). Together with factors like the increasing costs (social, financial and so on) associated with protection measures, higher population densities and urban development in higher risk areas and more complex critical infrastructure systems, these challenges diminish the capability (even willingness) of governments to guarantee the safety of citizens all the time (Coaffee and Wood, 2006;Stark and Taylor, 2014).…”