Fulfilling the promise of participation by not resuscitating the deficit model

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2019.03.001Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Knowledge production and information transfer for behaviour change has long been criticised but remains endemic.

  • Expert perceptions of public participation represent a valuable avenue to explore the unrealised ‘promise of participation’.

  • We demonstrate that knowledge-practices bound empowerment into impossibility.

  • The need for scaling, lessons, and other transfers of information distinguishes meaningful and superficial participation.

Abstract

'Participation with publics' has been embraced in both government and academic literatures as a necessary but currently unrealized means of governing socio-environmental challenges. This near-universal embrace carries global significance. Long-standing efforts in the context of disaster risk reduction (DRR) provide an opportunity to consider how experts have positioned participation such that it can only fail to empower publics. Using interviews with risk managers, we demonstrate that they impose boundaries on participation via application of a deficit model (DM). Despite continuous calls to make governance more participatory, we explore how the boundaries imposed on participation persist because of how experts are expected to do risk management, and how experts understand their occupations. As a result, meaningful publics-experts interactions are bounded into impossibility. Following demonstration of the DM as the essence of how experts conceive experts-publics interactions, using experts' own suggestions for improving risk reduction, we suggest relationship building as a way of reinvigorating participation. We explore how disaster risk reduction grounded in relationships could overcome existing boundaries, offering an easily-applied reconceptualization for differentiating meaningful from superficial participation, as well as a viable alternative to prevailing participatory methods. Given the intransigence of countless socio-environmental challenges and the need for improved interactions amongst experts-publics, the findings offer a novel pathway that may open an avenue to realizing the promise of participation.

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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