Knowledge Co-production Processes for Building Disaster Resilience of Communities in Coastal Areas: A Case Study of Baler, Aurora, Philippines

Abstract

One of the cornerstones of disaster risk reduction (DRR) is to build the resilience of communities against the negative effects of hazards. Part of this process may entail communities’ participation in knowledge co-production and decision making, which can be done through participatory grassroots approaches. To illustrate how strategies for building disaster-resilient communities would benefit from the use of grassroots assessments methods, a real-world application of a participatory approach was undertaken in the five coastal communities of Baler in the province of Aurora in the Philippines. The approach is two-pronged consisting of a survey of communities’ perception of disaster resilience, and a participatory workshop for understanding the gaps in the current DRR system. The former was based on a six-level scoring system modified and referenced from the Communities Advancing Resilience Toolkit (CART). The latter, on the other hand, evaluated the four components of disaster-resilient communities using the four resilience dimensions – people, community processes, organizations, and resources. The results revealed that coastal communities were generally not disaster-resilient as reflected by the issues in organizational, financial, infrastructure development, and institutional coordination within the municipality. This attempt to induce a transdisciplinary process has presented useful information sources and provided mechanisms for instilling collaboration among different DRR stakeholders. More importantly, it paved a way for understanding how to use and put value to local knowledge as a source of information in developing strategies for building disaster-resilient communities.