Lets Talk About Risk
Lead Investigator:
Charlotte Brown, Resilient Organisations
Funded project # 3496
Abstract
Engaging with communities about climate and natural hazard risks is a challenge for local authorities. Local authorities are at the frontline of work to prepare existing and future communities for an increased frequency and severity of natural hazard events, through their land-use planning as well as resilience and disaster preparedness efforts. Increasingly, local and regional councils are having conversations with communities to manage and reduce exposure to risk. These critical conversations ensure limited resources are allocated based on real needs and preferences of communities. However, the unique demands of these conversations, fears about public response, and limited guidance on engagement approaches are barriers to effective engagement.
This project aimed to better understand the challenges facing engagement practitioners and the factors that affect engagement method design. In 2022/2023, a panel of experienced engagement practitioners participated in a three round Delphi survey. This process was designed to elicit and collate best practice and to identify and define challenges faced by practitioners. Through the Delphi process, a review of literature by the research team, and additional practitioner input through our trans contextual learning group and community of practice workshops, nine critical challenges of natural hazard and climate risk engagement were identified. These were: high stakes nature of conversations, high levels of uncertainty, temporal nature of hazards, technical nature of content, need for multiple types of expertise, high variability of risk appetite across communities, lack of clarity around risk ownership (between individuals and communities), engagement underutilisation in decision making, and capability and capacity challenges.
In addition, six community and hazard related contextual factors were identified that affect how well an engagement is received, and therefore, how an engagement process should be designed. These include: spatial and temporal proximity to hazard, hazard familiarity, degree of distributional impacts, community capacity, and connection to place.
In October 2023, a practitioner survey was undertaken to explore capability and capacity challenges amongst practitioners. The survey highlighted a number of capability challenges including: lack of documented methodologies and advice on dealing with specific issues (e.g. differing views and distrust, communicating technical risk information, dealing with uncertainty, managing conflict), poor risk literacy/challenges interpreting technical risk information, and lack of professional development and networking opportunities.
The survey also highlighted several barriers that practitioners are facing when trying to undertake community engagement. These include: lack of support from organisations, including access to financial, personnel, tools, and time resources; lack of buy-in from decision makers; lack of resourcing for mana whenua engagement; and lack of clarity around central government direction and support for some issues (e.g., managed retreat).
Keywords
Multi-hazard; Community engagement; Empowering people; Social science;
Links to frameworks: