Decades of disaster research and practice highlight the community’s power across all parts of disaster management. Yet, this power often remains unrealized and untapped in practice. As discussed below, understanding and engaging with communities and their needs, improving resource allocation, and measuring results can better leverage the community’s power and promote successful disaster management preparation, responses, and outcomes.
After a disaster, households and communities almost always come together to support each other to rebuild, reconstruct, and reestablish their lives. Indeed, so much of recovery is in the hands of households and communities that researchers have repeatedly identified them, rather than governments, as the primary agents driving recovery.
Government policy recognizes this community power. At the federal level, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Whole Community approach frames disaster management as everyone’s responsibility and describes how government agencies should support others in achieving resilience. The FEMA approach includes the following tools and frameworks:
At state, local, tribal, and territorial levels, different agencies work with communities in various ways. Some have robust networks of volunteers they can utilize after disasters. A good example is Portland’s Bureau of Emergency Management’s Neighborhood Emergency Teams program. Others focus on a specific facet inhibiting the community’s ability to address crisis. The City of Boston, for instance, has four primary pathways for improving the city’s resilience to hazards.
Some of the reasons why disaster management rarely fully utilizes the community’s potential, include:
- The need to make recovery-related decisions rapidly in ways that can be hard to weigh in on;
- The difficulties faced by non-experts in navigating complex and esoteric recovery bureaucracies; and
- Communities that are so busy focusing on their immediate survival needs that they do not have the capacity to engage in broader recovery processes.
Regardless of the reasons, the result is that many communities are left behind in the recovery process. Although engaging with communities can be complex, communities are best positioned to drive effective recovery processes. Several strategies can be deployed to better realize the power of community in recovery.
Understand Community Dynamics
No two communities are the same. Each community has unique vulnerabilities, capacities, and needs, and each has its own leaders, areas of cooperation, and areas of disagreement. Understanding how communities work together is a critical first step in any recovery process, as it can avoid painful missteps and build on strengths. Many tools are available to help develop an understanding of community dynamics – including participatory rural appraisal techniques and risk analysis guidelines. Communities know their dynamics best, so engaging with them can help identify the most promising disaster management tools.
Identify Community Needs
Communities have different needs and recovery goals in responding to disasters. Questions that can help identify these needs and goals include:
- Does a community need access to healthcare? Housing? Financial resources?
- Do they need to reestablish a sense of place and normalcy?
- What barriers are inhibiting community members from meeting their own needs?
Knowing what a community needs without talking with its members is impossible. So, capturing community perspectives can be critical.
Develop Structures for Engaging in Community Recovery Planning
Disaster recovery is a years-long and decades-long process. During this time, community needs and resources evolve. Structures should, therefore, be implemented to engage with communities early. A recovery committee of community leaders that meets regularly can facilitate engagement with those with power and insight in the community. Many other countries have established such committees – including the Maldives, Vietnam and Japan, and Sierra Leone. Regular public recovery meetings and planning at the community level should be designed to promote transparency and information sharing.
Tie Engagements to Resource Allocation to Truly Partner
It is not enough to merely consult with communities. Instead, governmental and nongovernmental recovery resources must be allocated based on the results of community engagements. Directly tying the results of these engagements to recovery decision-making leads to action. For instance, if community members prioritize safe and affordable housing in their vision of recovery, there should be a structure in place that automatically allocates resources toward housing. If it is healthcare for older adults, that should be the funding focus.
Given the reality of post-disaster recovery funding, spending may be controlled outside of the community. If this is the case, advocacy can help lead decision-makers toward funding decisions that community members have identified as being in their own best interests. In addition, community members can secure their resources by applying for grants, seeking support from nonprofits, or establishing public-private partnerships.
Evaluate Recovery Using Community-Derived Metrics
Monitoring and evaluating progress toward disaster recovery is crucial for ensuring that recovery investments result in the targeted outcomes. Currently, recovery monitoring and evaluation is limited and does not necessarily link inputs to the most desirable community outcomes.
Stakeholders’ views may differ on whether recovery has been successful. A transportation agency might consider recovery successful if roads have been rebuilt, while a local chamber of commerce might focus on the extent to which businesses have returned. Ultimately, recovery is about people and should be measured through the communities’ perspectives rather than the systems they use. This means collaborating with communities to define mechanisms for accurately measuring success at the outcome level and tracking the inputs that led to success.
Understanding community dynamics, building relations with community leaders, and developing structures for engagement take time and resources. Fortunately, these strategies are also useful in general disaster management practices and can be part of broader preparedness and resilience-enhancing activities. They can also be nested into other routine processes where community engagement is already occurring – such as economic development planning, health assessments, and public safety. As a result, these strategies can be effective even for disaster and emergency managers with limited resources.
Aaron Clark-Ginsberg
Aaron Clark-Ginsberg is a behavioral/social scientist at RAND and a professor of policy analysis at the Pardee RAND Graduate School.
