People’s Participation in Disaster-Risk Reduction: Recentering Power

Abstract

People’s participation is widely acknowledged as a necessary component of effective, efficient, and inclusive disaster-risk reduction. However, there is little reflection on how commitments for participation in disaster literature and policy translate into meaningful participation in practice. Participation often takes the form of standardized, top-down approaches that have little interaction with decision-making processes. Such approaches often perpetuate existing power relations privileging some and marginalizing others, and resulting in misunderstandings, disillusionment, and creation or exacerbation of distrust among stakeholders. Many of these shortcomings can be attributed to a failure to adequately acknowledge, analyze, and accommodate power and power relations within the theory and practice of participation. Using examples drawn from both hazards literature and literature on participation in development at large, this paper identifies the need to (re)center in-depth and critical considerations of power and power relations within participatory practice and debate, and to develop frameworks for understanding and analyzing power and power relations in place-specific participation. Doing so will contribute to restoring the political potential of participation and provide insights for fostering the potential of people’s participation in disaster-risk reduction.