Culture and Risk: Understanding the Socio-Cultural Settings that Influence Risk from Natural Hazards

FINAL REPORT HERE
Selected Bibliography here or Reference here

Background

This e-conference is funded by the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) and by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) through the project “Too Much Too little water”. This project is implemented by ICIMOD and partners in order to strengthen adaptation strategies to increased droughts and floods in mountain catchment. Strengthening adaptation strategies to climate change is an important component of ICIMOD’s strategy. It requires understanding and accounting for people’s various ways of knowing, beliefs, and perceptions. Indeed what people do or do not do is influenced by, and influences, what people know and believe in. Beliefs influence choices about livelihoods, values, priorities, including people’s understanding, perceptions and responses to natural hazards. Different cultural beliefs have been shown to reduce, or in some cases increase, vulnerability to hazards. Various case studies the world over show that more data and new technologies alone are not going to improve disaster risk reduction. Practitioners, researchers and policy and decision makers should be aware of the power and influence of belief systems, including traditional explanations for hazards and nature. It could be argued that numerous efforts to reduce risk from hazards have been unsuccessful because they did not take cultural factors into account.

Objectives and Expected Outcomes

This e-conference seeks to address the following objectives:

• To understand the linkages between culture and risks from natural hazards through sharing and documenting concrete examples, stories, and best (or bad) practices on how belief systems matter in disaster management;
• To provide recommendations to policy and decision makers on how such sensitive and often deeply personal and identifying cultural aspects can be addressed and, to the extent that they pose a barrier to vulnerability reduction efforts, how they can be effectively overcome or circumvented; and,
• To map key experts, identify key issues, gaps and research questions, in order to develop a workshop agenda/research proposal to be organised in 2009.

The e-conference will generate a synthesis report and a policy note, which will be made available for download through the e-conference website. The policy note will also be disseminated by post to the relevant government and UN agencies and presented at various workshops/conferences whenever appropriate.

Themes

1) The role of socio-cultural settings in influencing peoples’ capacities to deal with risk from natural hazards and to adopt or reject modern safety measures
2008/09/22 - 2008/09/28

2) Bridging the gaps: approaches and methods of trans-cultural engagement, practices and the ethics
2008/09/29 - 2008/10/05

Participants and Moderator

This e-conference will provide an opportunity for local communities and practitioners, and researchers from all over the world working in the field of disaster risk reduction, development, and climate change adaptation to share their experience and understanding of how the socio-cultural settings determine risk from natural hazards. Dr. Kenneth Hewitt, Professor Emeritus at Wilfried Laurier University, Canada, will moderate the discussions. The participants’ contributions will be acknowledged and shared with the registered participants through the e-conference website and further disseminated through the e-conference publications.