Prospective Risk-Managed Development: Household and Community Resilience Strengthening through Adaptive Strategies for Sustainable Livelihoods and Basic Social Services Access

Overview of the RLRMC Approach

The battle rages on in academic and professional circles regarding how CCA fits into DRR or vice-versa. Discussions continue of how disaster risk creation and overall mainstreaming are part of the framework. And opposing dichotomous views of the idea of framing all of this within the concept of household and community resilience are much like those of the fruit durian as either gloriously comforting or revoltingly putrid. But RLRMC’s Prospective Risk-Managed Development approach addresses all of these concerns. The conceptual premises of this approach are as follows:

• Access & Minimizing Access Disruptions: The underlying reason for managing risk is ensuring reliability and sustainability of access to prioritized livelihood and service provision processes that contribute to living and well-being of people. So one part of integrated risk-managed development is ensuring that people have such access. And the second corresponding part is ensuring that any potential disruptions to such access will be minimized.
• Range of Risk Factors & Risk Optimization: Any definition of risk must include specification of risk from what, to what, and for whom. So risk is the potential access disruption of a certain type, amount, and duration for a specified group of people from a combination of risk factor hazards, vulnerabilities, and capacities. In addition to risk factors that can result in extreme disruptions in intensive disaster events for this group of people, there are also daily and seasonal risk factors that can result in chronic disruptions in extensive regular events for them. Rather than only ‘disaster risk reduction’, integrated risk-managed development should focus on ‘integrated risk optimization’ that focuses on minimization of prioritized potential disruptions across the spectrum of all risk factors.
• Acceptable vs. Unacceptable Risk & Residual vs. Corrective vs. Prospective Risk Management:
  1. Part of this optimization process involves acknowledging that there are tradeoffs among different risk factors that result in potentially affected people not choosing to reduce some of the risks. For example, this is very common among people who choose to live in hazard-prone areas because of the daily and seasonal livelihood and service benefits of living in those areas. There are also cost, technology, and other constraints that make reduction of some levels of risk not currently viable for them relative to other priorities. For example, a flood retention wall might be built to withstand a 100-year flood but not a 1,000-year flood.  This acknowledgment results in decisions needing to be made by potentially affected people of what levels of what risks are ‘acceptable’ or ‘unacceptable’.
  2. Deeming a certain level of a risk ‘acceptable’ acknowledges that there will inevitably be this level of access disruptions. Corresponding ‘residual risk reduction’ aims to minimize such post-event access disruptions through appropriately implemented preparedness activities.
  3. Deeming a certain level of a risk ‘unacceptable’ requires mitigation and adaptation activities to reduce this level to an acceptable level. One way of doing so is to learn lessons regarding what transpired in past events that caused access disruptions and to assume that future events will result in similar disruptions. ‘Conservative corrective risk reduction’ entails mitigating exposure or vulnerability of potentially affected people or resources based on such lessons learned from past events. ‘Progressive corrective risk reduction’ entails digging deeper into understanding and addressing the underlying poverty, marginalization, or other causes of why these people or resources were exposed or vulnerable to previous access disruption.
  4. But the assumption that future events will result in similar disruptions is increasingly flawed. Population demographics pressure, natural resource degradation, and other processes associated with developmental change and desertification, soil erosion, climate change, and other processes associated with environmental change are rapidly changing such exposure and vulnerability in many contexts. This means that the risks that we need to be mitigating against to prevent future disruptions are likely to be quite different than those experienced in the past or even deemed unacceptable currently. So ‘prospective risk management’ entails anticipating and addressing what these future potential disruptions will be. And prospective risk-managed development thereby incorporates preparedness for and adaptation against such potential future disruptions in the strategies for sustainable and reliable access to livelihoods and service provision.
• Integration: Integration across temporal periods, risk factors, livelihood and service sectors, and development decision-making priorities are all briefly mentioned above. Beyond these, the fifth and sixth main types of integration for risk-managed development are integration across different geographic locations spatially and across stakeholders involved in this decision-making.
  1. Vertical spatial integration is the linking of households to local groups of households and further up through different higher-level decision-making and implementation governance mechanisms.
  2. Horizontal spatial integration is the linking of groups of households, communities, or municipalities at the same level based on an understanding that they respond to a particular variable in a similar enough way to be considered covariate. GIS applications and resulting risk atlases aim to show such covariate spatial relationships for the purposes of risk management. But the term ‘risk atlas’ is inaccurate because much of risk is not covariate spatially. Although exposure can be covariate spatially, risk depends on the vulnerability to loss of access that is idiosyncratic to specific individuals or covariate by different vulnerability groups within a location.
  3. Stakeholder integration requires determination of what risk types and levels are idiosyncratic or covariate by vulnerability groups within a location and ensuring that representation of individual and group concerns are addressed through governance in decision-making. It also requires that risk analysis entails contributions toward co-created risk knowledge for this decision-making from insights from both these internal stakeholders and any external stakeholders who are people who have other insights that may be beneficial to consider in the analysis.
  4. So integrated prospective risk-managed development incorporates temporal, spatial, stakeholder, risk factor, sectoral, and mainstreamed development integration in the determination of acceptable and unacceptable levels of different anticipated future risks so that adaptive strategies can be developed to minimize disruption of prioritized levels of livelihood and service provision access.