7.5 Scaling up DRM

A strong civil society can play a critical role in creating social demand for DRM, by ensuring political responsibility and increased accountability, mostly at local levels (UNISDR, 2010; Gupta, 2011; Satterthwaite, 2011). Civil society organizations, where they have the ability and opportunity to organize and voice their positions, can reduce local risks while building political and economic imperatives for DRM. Without innovative local partnerships between civil society, local and central government and other stakeholders, instruments such as public investment planning or conditional cash transfers are unlikely to be effective. Also, as highlighted in the previous chapter, without such partnerships, land use management policies and building regulations may actually construct risk rather than reduce it.

Community-based DRM (CBDRM) has moved to centre stage within many NGOs, international organizations and some governments. The concept was originally described as a cost-effective approach to ensure greater government responsiveness and accountability to local needs, particularly those of risk-prone, low-income households and communities (Maskrey, 1989). In practice, however, it has often been limited to improvements in community preparedness and response capacities through local projects, and there are clear limits as to what risk-prone households and their organizations can achieve on their own (Satterthwaite, 2011). They only rarely control resources or influence decision-making processes in a way that could unlock access to safe land, manage complex watersheds, or undertake large-scale public works often necessary to reduce risk.

Real CBDRM occurs when risk-prone communities have been able to progressively engage and involve government and other supra-local actors to support their activities and improve accountability (Maskrey, 2011) (Box 7.6.). This approach to scale up local action implies a very different kind of engagement between civil society and governments than occurs in most CBDRM projects.


A number of characteristic local processes are evident where such a community-level engagement has occurred. These include riskprone households and their organizations gaining a greater awareness of local disaster losses, impacts and risks. There is the building of partnerships with local governments and other stakeholders, which allows negotiation on priorities, public investment and support, and the implementation of measures that not only reduce disaster risk, but have other benefits such as improvements in local infrastructure and services. There is also evidence of greater costeffectiveness and sustainability of investments (Maskrey, 1989; Maskrey, 2011; Satterthwaite, 2011).

Case studies from India (Livengood, 2011), the Philippines and the Caribbean (Pelling, 2010) show that local households have played an active role in increasing risk awareness in local governments, through exercises in risk mapping and vulnerability assessment. In Cuttack, India, for example, a joint government– community risk assessment process builds on more than two decades of communityled data collection and mapping. Today, the mapping includes GPS-marked boundaries and maps of informal settlements, producing digital maps at the city scale which can be presented to municipal authorities. This process of settlement identification, mapping and demarcation, encompassing all of Cuttack’s informal settlements, has led to an accurate and disaggregated database on risk and vulnerability that is fed into a city-wide assessment (Livengood, 2011).

A community organization on its own rarely has the leverage to engage governments or hold them to account, but networks and consortia of expert institutions and civil society organizations can promote government support to local initiatives. This can increase their effectiveness and sustainability, improve implementation, ensure accountability, help scale up local initiatives and projects and, importantly, play a key role in strengthening local capacities (Satterthwaite, 2011; Scott and Tarazona, 2011; Venton 2011).

When communities have some ownership of contributions to risk reduction, their ‘small pipes’ can be combined with the ‘large pipes’ of public services and infrastructure, and the unit costs of both community and local government investment can be reduced significantly. Then, there is also a better chance that central resources meet local needs, and that other vulnerabilities are reduced over time (Hasan, 2010). Scaling up such experiences calls for innovative financing arrangements that merge public planning and investment with local priority-setting and decision-making, as for example, in post-disaster reconstruction (Box 7.7).


A culture of public administration that provides incentives for working in partnership with lowincome groups, however, remains the exception rather than the rule and is a major obstacle to change in many countries. In some contexts, legal barriers may prohibit municipalities from working in informal settlements.

Although legislation and regulation requiring the participation of multiple stakeholders in planning and development have become more common, such measures may unintentionally legitimize government actions rather than encourage communities to question or challenge unresponsive institutions (Gupta, 2011). In Turkey, multi-stakeholder forums for building and planning include representation from civil society, academic institutions, professional and private sector organizations. However, their recommendations are rarely implemented, the mechanisms are difficult to sustain (Johnson, 2011), and participation has been influenced by state patronage (Ganapati, 2009; Oezerdem and Jacoby, 2006; Johnson, 2011). A lack of clarity in the law on what is meant by participation or weak enforcement provisions result in ineffective consultation processes or those that exist on paper only.

Scaling up local initiatives, therefore, requires new capacities and skills in local and central government institutions. It also requires a cultural shift in the attitude of municipal governments, contractors and non-governmental organizations towards working in partnership with low-income households and their representative organizations. ‘Volunteer technical communities’ can also play an important role in this process, filling gaps in knowledge and technology (Blanchard, 2011). In many cases, such changes have been triggered by a new generation of elected mayors with a sincere commitment to improve conditions in informal settlements (Satterthwaite, 2011). Cities are also learning from one another about innovative approaches to planning, financing and development. In contrast to high-income countries where DRM is largely provided for by the government, risk-prone households and communities in low- and middle-income countries have always had to innovate creative solutions to manage their risks. As an increasing number of national and city governments start to put in place structures and resources to support and facilitate local efforts, a new perspective for risk governance is opening up.