• Participation should be supported by sufficient resources, including information, organizational capacity, skills and finance.
• Participation should be enabled for an adequate time period for the purpose, noting that this will vary significantly across problems.
• The time scale of participatory approaches for enhancing community resilience should essentially be open ended.
• Public participation and community engagement should be efficient. Engage- ment is almost always voluntary and even though the benefits to communities may be significant, the scarcity of the resource of volunteerism instructs that processes should be efficient in order to avoid wasted time and effort, and to allow for wider participation.
• Those relevant to the problem should be included, demanding a reasonably fine-scale understanding of the ‘community’, and multiple participatory strategies are necessary in order to include all parts of the community.
• There should be sensitivity to the potential for a specific participatory design to exclude some people or interests, even unwittingly. Exclusion always has the potential to backfire on the organizers, especially given the inherent unpredict- ability of the emergency field.
• Attention should be paid to the inclusion of marginalized or less powerful indi- viduals and groups, who are often the worst affected by disaster and have the least capacity for recovery.
• Participating individuals and groups should be made aware of the limits of knowl- edge and uncertainties surrounding the issues.
• All involved should be cognizant of the view that participation in emergency management is ideally about collaboration (doing with) rather than direction (doing to).
• Strategies, methods and processes for participation should be selected from a wide set of options, suited to different but equally valid purposes.
• Given that participation seeks to increase understanding and coordination in human societies, communication and information are an essential component of participatory policy strategies and are two-way processes. Both those at risk and agencies require this understanding.
Policy processes that are consistent with these principles are by no means easier; in fact, they are more complicated and difficult. Yet, if the outcomes and defensibility of policy with wider inputs and ownership are likely to be better, as is widely argued, then engaging with, rather than ignoring, this complexity and difficulty will produce better processes and outcomes. To finish this chapter, we now turn to an expansion of the final principle: communication.
imperative regarding disasters is the transfer of appropriate information concerning the nature of risks faced, what to do in the case of an event, and post-event assistance and recovery strategies and resources. The art and craft of such communication is core business to the emergency management sector, and is the subject of a large theoretical and practical literature on risk communication (see, for example, articles in the journal Risk Analysis, and many websites accessible via links at www.colorado.edu/hazards; see also Twigg, 2004). Here, the focus on the policy and institutional aspects of disasters invites a different perspective – on communication pathways to enhance public participation, especially in strategic policy choice, and the institutional settings conducive to enhancing such participation.
Policy directions arise from the sharing of information and perspectives, and discussing this with policy networks and communities. Greater participation of a broader range of perspectives in disaster policy – either the public directly or their representatives – enlarges the policy community, and demands a transformation of information types and pathways. New actors will inevitably require new communi- cation forms and bring new forms of information with them into the policy proc- ess, including local empirical knowledge. Many of the participatory approaches surveyed above, such as deliberative methods and inclusion of cross-sectoral representatives within existing policy forums, serve to bring new perspectives into policy discourses. Two important considerations arise here: the role of information in policy processes and the different modes of communication required in more participatory policy processes (these issues are explored further in Chapter 7).
On the first of these, the role of information in policy processes, a common assumption must be unseated. Too often, it is assumed that information has or should have a linear cause–effect relationship to policy – the assumption of rational utilization, where information produces a rational response in the form of policy change. In fact, rational utilization of information is rare or, at least, very hard to establish. As an arena of multiple and contested values, agendas, compromise and political decisions based on ideology, expediency and pragmatism, policy does not often wait – or simply cannot afford to wait – for the best possible information on which to base decisions. Rather, a satisfactory or tolerable level of information is often the most that is available.
A single form or source of information is rarely involved, but rather a mix of political judgement, public attitudes, expert reports and so on. In such a deci- sion-making environment, information is utilized in less than rational ways, and understandably so. We can consider a number of forms of information utilization, summarized as follows (from Hezri, 2004, drawing on an extensive empirical and theoretical literature in knowledge utilization):
• instrumental use, where information directly and demonstrably influences a policy or management decision;
• conceptual use, where information percolates into the understanding of the recipients, influencing their understanding of problems and of cause and effect;
• political and symbolic use, where information is used for tactical or strategic reasons in the interests of the individual or group.
Much is made of the rapidly evolving world of contemporary information and communication technology. We are not concerned here with communication during a crisis other than the issue of planning for such circumstances. New modes of communication are often seen as a panacea, with the use of websites often viewed as solving communication problems. Certainly, the internet has made it easy to have documents and other material readily available at low cost and to have interactive discussion groups and bulletin boards – in short, to exchange views and ideas.
Nevertheless, achieving ‘communication’ as an interactive engagement between people remains challenging.
Communication research has been dominated by commercial and political ques- tions of how to persuade people at a distance and, from a distance, how to make the communication experience more personal and therefore persuasive. Modern communication technologies may have reduced the credibility gap between face- to-face encounters and communication at a distance. However, a reasonable level of consensus exists to the effect that face-to-face encounters remain the preferred way of communicating, where results depend on mutual understanding, negotiation and persuasion – trust remains a key factor whether in an interagency situation or work- ing with communities (see Irwin, 1995).
The strong trend towards evidence-based policy and practice in many areas, including emergency management – albeit within the context set out above of competing interests and agendas – demands an appropriate information base: appro- priate in the sense that it provides usable material for emergency management. It may be unfortunate; but information in scientific journals and other specialized fora that may be directly relevant to policy development is often not consulted and incorporated within policy. An exception would be scientific information on many natural hazards. However, there are numerous examples where such information has been suppressed or sidelined: this has happened to flood-related information around the world, and some governments have actively sidelined debate on climate change and variability. Nevertheless, policy drawing on firm evidence abounds (e.g.
the Australian wildfire and London smog cases set out in Chapter 1). Flood, earth- quake and hurricane wind-related regulations are based on science globally, as are regulations for industrial and transportation hazards, although frequently there are questions about implementation (see Chapter 6). Local knowledge, derived from consultation and engagement with communities at risk, is often key to emergency management success or failure, especially in implementation. It is not found in the world of science.
Emergency management relies on a number of types of information for policy development and implementation – primarily, information on hazards, whether physical, technological or of some other source; on the assets, including people and activities, at risk; and on local emergency management-relevant capacities (both tangible, such as infrastructure, and intangible, such as people’s mental preparedness).
Important but less obvious information is found in local knowledge and concerns local procedures and capacities for implementing risk-related regulations and policy, the realities of the institutional legal and political contexts, and local customs and habits that may affect emergency management thinking and practice. Development and economic status and trends may also be relevant. This material is used as the
basis for land-use planning, building codes, to identify vulnerabilities from which to develop policies for enhancing resilience, for risk management, and to support emergency preparedness and planning.
If we consider the question of ‘who needs to know what?’ we can match these different forms of information with appropriate ‘communities’.