The politics of participation in community-based early warning systems: Building resilience or precarity through local roles in disseminating disaster information?

The benefits and negative impacts of citizen science applications to water as experienced by participants and communities

“…Papers reporting disaster risk reduction projects often inferred decreased risk through raised awareness of vulnerabilities and impacts when an EWS had been established or when vulnerability maps were collaboratively created. Examples include (all from Nepal) river stage monitoring for a community‐based flood EWS (Gautam & Phaiju, 2013; Gladfelter, 2018), rainfall monitoring for a landslide EWS (Malakar, 2014), and participatory vulnerability mapping (Maharjan, Maharjan, Tiwari, & Sen, 2017).…”

“…Regarding knowledge gain, increased scientific literacy, and decreased risk, there was abundant observed and investigated evidence from other studies suggesting these benefits are often realized. However, because of the listed exceptions where investigation revealed, for example, that knowledge gain did not occur (Overdevest et al, 2004;Selman et al, 2010) or when intended empowerment had the opposite effect (Gaventa & Barrett, 2010;Gladfelter, 2018), or when later follow-up assessment revealed that new knowledge and skills did not lead to the desired actions (Ducrot, van Paassen, Barban, Dare, & Gramaglia, 2015), it may sometimes be inaccurate to infer benefits. F I G U R E 7 How benefits and negative impacts were mentioned for different citizen science typologies…”

Nordic Societal Security

“…3 In addition to the dominant threat perceptions and the epistemological grounding of security governance, the questions of who the key security providers are and to whom or what security is provided for can be used to separate different security logics from each other. When it comes to situating the agency of societal security governance, resilience strategies tend to emphasise private sector, civil society, and eventually individual citizens (Gladfelter, 2018;Stark and Taylor, 2014;Tierney, 2015). However, as several scholars have recently pointed out, the relocation of the agency does not necessarily mean a true transition of power from the central or local government to the local actors and civil society (in terms of being able to define what societal resilience means as a strategic objective) (see, e.g., Roth and Prior, 2014, p. 108;Stark and Taylor, 2014;.…”

Communicating high impact weather: Improving warnings and decision making processes

“…The broader social and political context in which flood warnings are obtained and disseminated in the context of a community based early warning system, is the focus of Gladfelter's (2018) contribution to this special issue. Using the case study in Nepal, this paper outlines the challenges that NGOs can face in balancing the need for initiatives that reduce vulnerability to severe events amongst marginalised communities, with avoiding placing an undue burden on these communities and inadvertently perpetuating existing inequalities.…”

“…While all of the papers within this special issue focus on the challenge of communicating high impact weather events, they employ a broad range approaches to doing so. Methodologies represented include interviews (Bostrom et al, 2018;de la Poterie et al, 2018), surveys (Bostrom et al, 2018;Morss et al, 2018;Potter et al, 2018), judgement and decision experiments (Casteel, 2018;Ihti et al, 2018;Losee et al, 2018;Morss et al;Potter et al), participatory stakeholder workshops (Kox et al 2018), case studies (Gladfelter, 2018), ethnography (Balay-As et al, 2018), conceptual reviews (Anderson-Berry et al, 2018) and social media analysis (Rossi et al, 2018). However, despite the diverse range of perspectives represented, common themes are clearly identifiable.…”