Local understanding of community disaster resilience in rural Cambodia: exercises of localism and lessons learned from villagers’ workshops

Abstract

Community disaster resilience has become a key concept in the field of climate change and development, but it often remains a third party’s terms (e.g. donors’ or researchers’) rather than being understood from local perspectives. In an attempt to understand it in local terms, and to exercise localism in seeking the next steps of a climate change adaptation project, this study used focal group interviews organized in a manner of local workshops in Battambang, Cambodia. Villagers were encouraged to speak about what they had (strengths and assets) and saw opportunities (although many were expected to come externally). Addressing threats, they pointed out some broader issues, such as market failure and structural power issues, such as crop pricing, which were never prioritized in the initial project, partly because of limited local participation in agenda setting. The strength of this research is its action-oriented data collection technique, which produced and shared findings that are meaningful to the community for possible interventions. The findings point to a holistic approach of (climate-driven disaster-) resilient development, which requires addressing governance and market issues. By engaging community members, we also hope these exercises have contributed to increasing their sense of ownership or to ‘agency facilitation’.