Community Participation in Disaster Risk Sensitive Development Planning

The Pacific Framework for Action 2005 – 2015: Building the Resilience of Nations and Communities to Disaster calls for the participation of Pacific Island Communities in planning and decision making for effective Disaster Risk Management. As Pacific Island Communities frequently form the first line of response to events of a localized nature and have first hand knowledge of the hazards, vulnerabilities and development priorities within their communities, a strong commitment to the participation of communities in risk sensitizing development projects and programmes is essential.
As disaster risk reduction activities often take place as a by-product of development of practice, a new, holistic approach is needed. One of the ways is ensuring community participation in this process. But what does ‘community participation’ amount to? And how can participation of communities in development planning be achieved in a meaningful way?
One of the biggest challenges to community participation in development planning is how to draw out local perspectives and traditional knowledge on resource management and local environments and to translate them in into a format that can be used by both community and policy makers that address local needs. A closely related challenge is ensuring that once identified community priorities are connected to local and ultimately national level planning processes and allocated funding.