a typology of ‘participation’ to differentiate actions according to the level of power agencies wish to devolve to participants in determining outcomes and actions.
The International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) has developed the Public Participation Spectrum (IAP2 2019) to demonstrate the possible types of engagement with stakeholders and communities. The spectrum is widely used and is quoted in most community engagement manuals.
According to the spectrum there are five types of engagement:
1 Inform – to provide stakeholders with balanced and objective information.
2 Consult – to actively seek community views and input into policy, plans, and decisions.
3 Involve – to deliberately put into place a method to work directly with stakeholders throughout the process.
4 Collaborate – to partner with the community in each aspect of the decision.
5 Empower – to place final decision-making in the hands of the public.
As one moves through the spectrum from ‘inform’ through to ‘empower’ there is a corresponding increase in expectation for public participation and impact. In simply ‘informing’ stakeholders there is no expectation of receiving feedback, and consequently there is a low level of public impact. At the other end of the spectrum, ‘empowering’ stakeholders to make decisions implies an increase in expectations and therefore an increased level of public impact.
The IAP2 Spectrum has been widely used to guide the design of disaster-related community engagement. For example, the Australian Government has provided guidance (Australian Emergency Management Institute 2013) that uses the spectrum because ‘different types of engagement and levels of community involvement are required for different phases of an emergency’.
It could be argued that ‘empower’ is the only true level of engagement as it enables communities to have power in decision-making (Mosse 2003). Mansuri and Rao (2004) distinguish between ‘organic participation’, which originates from the people's own initiative to be active in some aspect of social change, and ‘induced participation’, which is the normal type that arises when an organisation wants to implement a project with the local people and participation is induced by the outside organisation. Arnstein (1969) argued that ‘participation without redistribution of power is an empty and frustrating process for the powerless’. For disaster-related community engagement ‘this may be overcome by an approach that builds community-wide trust and meets the real needs of those at risk’ (International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies 2014b).
2.3.2 Crowdsourcing
Public participation in gathering scientific observation about the world is not a new phenomenon. Following the devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755, volunteers from all over Europe reported their experiences to help researchers create an early version of a ‘shake map’ that estimated the extent and intensity of the event (Coen 2012).
The term ‘crowdsourcing’ was coined in 2006 by journalist Jeff Howe to describe the ways in which the internet and mobile phones are facilitating the outsourcing to the public of tasks traditionally reserved for experts (Howe 2006).
Crowdsourcing can be described as the phenomenon where large groups of people (‘the crowd’) are used as the primary source of required services or content, typically on a voluntary basis and sometimes using internet-based channels. According to Holley (2010), ‘crowdsourcing uses social engagement techniques to help a group of people achieve a shared, usually significant, and large goal by working collaboratively together as a group’.
Disasters are prime examples of situations where the collective capacity of the crowd can make a difference. If properly organised, the crowd can bring direly needed extra capacities to professionals and help accelerate the disaster recovery process. Also, crowdsourcing platforms help to bridge collaboration and information gaps between the various communities that play a role in disaster management (Neef et al. 2013).
Crowdsourcing can also be used prior to a disaster in community risk awareness and participation in risk mitigation and preparedness activities. ‘An important reason to consider including crowdsourcing in risk assessment is that in addition to providing information, participants are themselves learning about risk in their area. Crowdsourcing thus becomes an avenue for risk communication through outreach and sensitization. Through involving new participants in the process, crowdsourced approaches also create opportunities to make risk assessment more inclusive. This can both improve the quality of the risk assessment through including local knowledge and raise public confidence in the results through increased understanding and ownership of the results’ (Soden 2017).
2.3.3 Citizen Science
Many projects tend to involve interested people who collect information to achieve a particular scientific research goal or goals. ‘Most successful crowdsourcing projects are not about large anonymous masses of people. They are not about crowds. They are about inviting participation from interested and engaged members of the public’ (Owens 2019). In this way, these crowdsourcing activities can be viewed as ‘contributory citizen science’. However, as Eitzel et al. (2017) remark, ‘not all citizen science is crowdsourcing and not all crowdsourcing is citizen science, some authors are concerned that these two words may become synonymous …’.
A fundamental aspect of citizen science is that the research goal is defined by a particular person or group, with participants recruited through an open call providing some significant effort towards achieving that goal or goals. It describes the engagement of people in scientific processes who are not tied to institutions in that field of science. Citizen science projects can range from projects developed completely independently within individual volunteer initiatives, to collaborative transdisciplinary work, to formalised instructions and guidance provided by scientific facilities.
There are numerous projects and disaster learning activities that involve the scientific collection of data for research and emergency management purposes. The growth in more readily available and low-cost technologies – such as smartphones, social media, and the internet itself – is allowing disaster citizen science initiatives to grow rapidly. For example, in northeast England, a citizen science project has harvested and used quantitative and qualitative observations from the public in a novel way to effectively capture spatial and temporal river response (Starkey et al. 2017). According to these researchers, not only are these ‘community-derived datasets most valuable during local flash flood events, particularly towards peak discharge’, they assist in community risk awareness.
2.3.4 Community Participatory Disaster Risk Assessment
As part of disaster risk management, an understanding of the spatial dimensions of risk is required across vulnerability, exposure, and hazard, as well as the at-risk community's capacities (Keating et al. 2016). However, ‘a major gap still exists between what the models can provide and what local practitioners need; and there is a serious lack of appropriate local information on disaster impacts, as well as information on exposure and vulnerability, the latter of which is especially difficult to define, measure, and monitor’ (Liu et al. 2018).
Community participatory disaster risk assessment has been considered an effective way to collect disaster risk information. Major humanitarian and development organisations and agencies, such as the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Oxfam, and CARE International, have used community-based participatory risk assessments to gather, organise, and analyse information on the locale-specific vulnerability and capacity of communities. There are numerous
