Prospective Risk Managed Development

Spatial horizontal integration of the impacts of external factors on the vulnerability context:

• Endogenous internal development strategies can contribute to such problems as local soil erosion, deforestation, and water contamination or pumping. These can result in daily and seasonal stresses such as lack of usable water and lack of crops or fodder.  They can also result in extreme shocks such as landslides, subsidence, and conflict.
• But the effects on the vulnerability context and future risk scenario of exogenous external trends must also be considered. Creeping environmental problems such as desertification, salinization and climate change cross geographic boundaries and affect both the means and the extremes of stresses and shocks. Development activities outside of the decision-making area can also directly affect its daily and seasonal stresses such as when water is contaminated due to upstream pollution or no longer accessible due to upstream diversion. Such external development activities can also indirectly affect stresses and shocks through their effects on environmental change.

Spatial vertical integration for adaptive internal and external governance:

• Although much of the focus during the ‘hazard’ paradigm of DRR was on structural physical infrastructure to reduce exposure and physical vulnerability, a key problem with structural approaches is that they tend not to be adaptive.
• Adaptive strategies require more investment in human and social capital. Internally, the human capital skills and knowledge and the social capital empowerment of committees and such institutions that can oversee development and the needed management of changes in relationships will directly contribute to being able to adapt. Indirectly, such empowerment can also enable local committees to express their concerns to local and higher levels of government so that aforementioned exogenous external development that is adversely affecting the vulnerability context can be identified and addressed.

Sectoral integration:

• Livelihoods are an important driver of self-protection that enables people to have better access to basic social services and other needs and wants. But, as basic social services and risk management are also key to enabling reliable livelihoods access, the converse is also true. For example, water has uses for households, risk management such as fire brigades, service facilities like hospitals and schools, and livelihood needs such as crops, livestock, fishponds, factories, and markets.
• Risk identification, analysis, and assessment should consider how changes affect all relevant functions and processes. And resulting strategies should consider interplay between different uses and synergies in determining how to best optimize across integrated opportunities and risks associated with livelihoods, BSS, and residual, corrective, and prospective risk management.

Temporal integration that further considers future effects scenarios, capacities, and outcomes:

• In addition to the endogenous internal feedback effects of local livelihood, BSS, and risk management strategies and outcomes, exogenous external environment change and development change will have direct effects on especially the natural and physical capital resource base that should be considered.
• With all endogenous and exogenous effects on daily, seasonal, and extreme stresses and shocks considered in the vulnerability context, risk scenarios can be created that inform what livelihood, BSS, and risk management strategies to take now to manage anticipated future changes in opportunities and risks.
• By doing this, future outcomes can also be anticipated and managed so that optimization of strategies integrates across short-term outcomes and long-term outcomes.

With the means and extremes of daily, seasonal, and extreme hazards and vulnerabilities expected to continue to change more rapidly, being able to identify change and adapt to it with local context-appropriate adaptive strategies is increasingly important. Such adaptive systems should be able to adapt to changing local conditions and capacities and do so quickly through decision-making and action that is closer to the problem. Investment in local empowerment through training of local human capital skills and knowledge and development of social capital institutions and relationships are key to such adaptiveness. Such investment should be done long-term in an evolution of steps or processes of increasing adaptive capacities. Analyzing the described elements of this Prospective Risk-Managed Development framework helps to identify context-appropriate adaptive strategies for sustainable livelihoods and adaptive basic social services access.

And such adaptiveness, flexibility, and sustainability in prospective risk-managed development are also the main indicators of resilience strengthening.  Although debates continue regarding the merits and demerits of adopting resilience strengthening as an over-arching framework, one of the benefits of the resilience approach is that its systems thinking requires a prospective and integrated approach.  Developing the capacities to absorb, adapt, and transform requires understanding the linkages vertically, horizontally, and temporally of stakeholders and how the risk factors affecting one process can affect the entire system. Rather than the old disaster management continuum approach, resilience is a ‘contiguum’ approach of building systems that can absorb chronic problems in ways that can expand or contract to accommodate extra needs for resisting, adapting, and responding in times of shock.  And since the elements and processes in the systems along with their vulnerabilities are always changing, the resilience approach also seeks transformative capacities to modify the system and strategies within it in ways that ‘engage with change’.

Another advantage of both the resilience lens and the adaptation lens is that they don’t focus exclusively on disasters.  Although the paradigm shock realized during a disaster or conflict event has often been a window of opportunity to discuss chronic risks relative to acute risks, addressing climate change and overall resilience is encouraging people to open that window without need for such an event. Accordingly, we hope that viewing access through such lenses continues to encourage use of the frameworks and tools of RLRMC’s Prospective Risk-Managed Development approach to prospectively address changing extensive and intensive risks rather than only correctively addressing the causes of previous intensive risk event damages and losses.