Fulfilling the promise of participation by not resuscitating the deficit model
Section snippets
Introduction: participation, knowledge, and disaster risk reduction
Hazard and risk researchers, from the 1970s onwards (Hewitt, 1983; O’keefe et al., 1976), but with roots generations old (Burton and Kates, 1964; White, 1945), have struggled with the challenge of translating knowledge into better governance. As part of his academic farewell, pioneering risk researcher Gilbert White along with two of his primary acolytes reflected on the paradox of knowing more while having little-to-no impact. Their synthesis explored four possible explanations:
(1) knowledge
Methods, case, and analysis
In the introduction we discussed how both the academic and grey literatures display signs of incompatibility between academic interpretations of participation and the boundaries that experts impose onto participation in practice. Our research builds upon Davies’ (2008) research of experts’ perceptions of publics, adding to her framing experts’ perceptions of: DRR in the context of long standing debates concerning participation (Arnstein, 1969; Callon, 2004, 1999; Reed, 2008); responsibilities
Risk management as the deficit model
In each of the interviews with disaster management experts, information transfer is portrayed as the primary means of implementing governance. Disaster management is shown to be the development and communication of expert-approved information, with the aim of behaviour change amongst publics often left implicit. The experts preface the communication of information with the construction of an unaware public, which effectively defines the experts-publics relationship that guides their
Analysis: experts and their boundaries
The findings suggest that the deficit model is not simply present in risk management but is an accurate description for the knowledge-practices that guide expert managers. The respondents describe struggles with the associated boundaries but, nonetheless, cannot seem to escape the normalisation of knowledge-practices associated with the DM. Their opinions represent a complicated and somewhat paradoxical situation in which disaster risk reduction is interpreted to be rooted in knowledge
Practicing risk management without information transfer
At present, the resurfacing of the deficit model via participation, subtly but effectively, reasserts expert authority. A helpful way of recognising when and how the deficit model is reasserted is to ask ‘what is expected of the knowledge produced through participation?’ If the answer is that knowledge will require transfer in order to prompt change in other individuals, times, locations, or scales, then the DM is resuscitated: it becomes no different than transferred expert information, though
Conclusion
Our argument is not that knowledge is unimportant or that information should not be transferred, but that it should not be the method of DRR and should certainly not be its objective. We suggest that current interpretations of risk management default to information transfer to the detriment of appreciating that it is when relationships are formed that risk reduction is accomplished; this finding is absent from the DRR literature and, we suspect, might inform other cases, contexts, and
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to acknowledge to constructive suggestions provided by Dr. Tim Neale, Dr. JC Gaillard, Dr. Paula Satizábal, and Isabel Cornes. We are indebted to the participants who spoke with us, to each of the reviewers who have added immensely to our submission, and to the editorial team for creating an incredibly constructive process.
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2023, Progress in Disaster ScienceCitation Excerpt :Sanfey & Hastie [44] and Lipkus et.al [45] found out that if the public were given good-quality information particularly in narrative form and using frequencies, they made accurate judgments and preferences. Elsewhere, this has been associated with what is referred to as the co-production of knowledge, a process of joint knowledge generation and transmission through embracing the fullest participation of community as active agents [46,47,48]. For example, in the area of climate change and disasters, various researchers have sought to transform risk knowledge into a technical transmission model into one where multiple lines of evidence are integrated by community members themselves.