Effective CBDRM recognizes local people’s perspectives, priorities and their knowledge to

3. Effective CBDRM recognizes local people’s perspectives, priorities and their knowledge to

deal with adversity with a focus on livelihood resilience 25

To ensure that CBDRM interventions will be relevant, appropriate and a priority for local people, it is important to explore and analyse people’s risk landscape. ‘Risk landscape’ refers to the wide range of risks to which local people are exposed, like disaster risks, but also risk as a result of diseases, famine, unemployment, insecure land rights or violence. Local people stress to not only identify the imme- diate hazard risks, but also to understand why they are exposed to these risks, referring to the under- lying risk factors, and how they deal with these and survive crisis (Cosgrave, 2007; CARE, Groupe URD, WUR, 2013). When the attention of aid agencies would be limited to the occurrence of disasters, they run the risk to be blind for more urgent community concerns which render interventions irrelevant and a waste of scarce resources and energy. For example if NGOs and government would focus on tsunami and earthquake risks in coastal communities, they could be blind for more urgent risks like coastal erosion and recurrent flooding and how this negatively impact people’s land issues and livelihoods.

Another important reason to explore people’s risk landscape is to understand the different risk per- spectives between and within communities that may cause tensions between groups of people.

A proper understanding of all the different perceptions and related social and political connections pro vides an opportunity to play a role in dialogue and negotiation between different communities and social groups (see previous core pre-requisite). The handbook developed by the ADPC (Abarquez & Murshed, 2004) is mostly applied and adapted by both (I)NGOs and govern ment agencies. The handbook provides guidance on how to conduct a risk assessment with the involvement of com- muni ties. However, the handbook remains silent about how to act as facilitator when different groups of people within the village, or between villages perceive risk differently, have a different explanation of why disasters happen and to whom, or (ab)use participatory approaches for their own agenda-setting. Risk solutions do not necessarily benefit all people in the village in the same way.

“ Floods are destructive for upstream villages but a blessing for tail-end villages In Khulm, Northern Afghanistan, for example “floods are destruc tive” for upstream villagers who invest

efforts in flood protection, sandbag ging, enforcement of irrigation canals, and in lobbying for flood protection measures at the side of the canal intake. Whereas “floods are a blessing” for downstream farmers who rely on floods to access irrigation water during spring. It is in their interest to maintain good relations with the upstream villagers since they depend on them for drinking and irrigation water. This example shows how people perceive risk differently about the same disaster event, how risk perceptions are embedded in people’s social positions, and how people’s options are related to local institutional settings, in this case on rules of water distribution. Likewise, men and women may perceive risk differently as well and put different priorities to what should happen to reduce risk (CBDRM case study from Heijmans, 2012).

25 Most of this text is taken from the Handbook Resilience 2. published by CARE-Nederland, Groupe URD and Wageningen University. The text of the Handbook and the case studies are based on the PhD thesis of Heijmans (2012).