CBRM/CBA

Overview of the RLRMC Approach

Researchers, government ministries and agencies, non-government organizations, and other such stakeholders external to potential consequences of decisions are often considered to utilize a scientific approach to risk identification, risk analysis, risk assessment, and resulting model-based risk management decision-making.  But, as this approach must be based on assumptions regarding causes and effects and many such analyses can result in different conclusions, this framework calls such conclusions external stakeholder risk perceptions.  Whether it is called indigenous knowledge, traditional knowledge, or local knowledge based on who the affected people are, the local households, producers, institutions, and government stakeholders who are internal to potential decision consequences also have varying degrees of scientific approaches to determining understandings of the causes and salient effects of risks that they face based on mental models of experience-based local data.  Within one community, different sub-communities and individual households or household members can have different internal stakeholder risk perceptions. And the internal and external stakeholders may generally have different types of relevant data. For example, internal stakeholders may have a better understanding of past and current risks and how development and environmental changes have been transpiring locally while external stakeholders may have a better understanding of how development and climate change factors outside the local area will affect future risks.

Accordingly, making decisions based on only one or a few of such internal and/or external stakeholder risk perceptions can lead to strategy decisions that are not accepted or not sustained.  So decision-making should be done based on a process of stakeholder integration in risk identification, analysis, and assessment that allows decision-making by representatives of the people who would need to accept and sustain the decided-upon strategies.  For this purpose, the definition of ‘community’ and ‘sub-communities’ within it will depend on the level of vertical spatial integration (from household to village to district to watershed and so forth) of the risk and potential decision strategies and consequences.  When this process focuses primarily on disaster risks, it is often called Community-Based Disaster Risk Management (CBDRM) or Community-Based Disaster Risk Reduction (CBDRR).  When it focuses primarily on risks related to climate change and other creeping environmental problems (CEPs), it is often called Community-Based Adaptation (CBA).  The RLRMC process that subsumes both in management of prospective disaster, environment, and development-created risks is called Community-Based Risk Management (CBRM).