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It is instructive to juxtapose two contrasting models of risk communication. The first views risk communication as a product that is packaged and transmitted, unmodified and intact, to a passive public. The second, a relational approach, views it as a process in which experts, the public, and agencies engage in open communication, regarding the public as an equal partner in risk communication. The second model has the benefit of taking advantage of the public’s local knowledge and ability to engage in risk communication themselves. Risk communication should be understood as more of a dynamic process, and less of a packaged object. An example of the relational model is found in Bangladesh’s Cyclone Preparedness Programme, which has incorporated the relational model in its disaster risk reduction training for community volunteers. Nevertheless, the two contrasting models, in practice, are never mutually exclusive, and both are needed for effective disaster risk prevention.

A world in flux confronts the present generation, raising fears of systems gone awry. Whether it is the prospect of runaway climate change or the dangers of unbridled artificial intelligence, these dilemmas suggest that scientific and technological remedies have not been matched by progress in harnessing social and political capacities for collective action. Part of this impasse stems from a gap between the multidimensional nature of contemporary global crises and unidimensional modes of understanding and managing them. In this article, we describe an integrative approach rooted in the paradigm of social ecology that might enable us to tackle these challenges more comprehensively. We discuss, for example, how a social ecological perspective focuses attention not only on the carbon footprint of society but also on the social footprint of carbon. We review the tenets of social ecology and reflect on its promise for spurring new modes of collaborative research and collective action, including more effective strategies for planetary governance.

Previous work has focused on the role of social capital on resilience. However, this research tends to search for civic and other organizations, often formal institutionalized groups which, when they are not found, leads to questions about how social networks are possibly governed. Without formal organizational structures to govern these networks, how is pro-environmental/pro-social behavior sustained. In this article, we focus on a diffused mechanism for collective action, which is referred to as relationality. Relationality is a theory that underscores how social connectedness, through mechanisms of empathy, foster collective action in noncentralized modes of network governance. The concept of relationality addresses important issues not considered by the literature on social capital --so being, we will refer to relational elements as relational capital. Relational capital constitutes a type of asset that communities can activate vis-a-vis environmental and other perturbation. As we describe, the evidence for relationality as an important mechanism for sustainability and resilience is accumulating. © 2023 by the authors.

Purpose: The intent of the work is to go beyond the conventional model of disaster risk prevention, where community residents are objects of risk communication initiatives, and develop and implement a relational model of risk communication wherein they are active agents of knowledge transfer. Design/methodology/approach: The relational model of risk communication translates risk knowledge into narrative forms that community members can share. The article discusses the conceptual basis of the model and, then, describes how it has been pilot tested and implemented in the field. Evaluation of the pilot tests consist of pre- and post-surveys comparing control and test groups. Findings: Encouraging results have been seen among vulnerable communities, such as residents in a refugee camp and schoolchildren in a storm surge vulnerable town. These outcomes support the idea that the relational approach can empower residents to be active agents of risk communication. Originality/value: The relational model taps into the knowledge and agency of community. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.

This Element argues that relational policy analysis can provide deeper insights into the career of any policy and the dynamics of any policy situation. This task is all the more difficult as the relational often operates unseen in the backstages of a policy arena. Another issue is the potentially unbounded scope of a relational analysis. But these challenges should not dissuade policy scholars from beginning to address the theme of relationality in public policy. This Element sketches a conceptual framework for the study of relationality and illustrates some of the promise of relational analysis using an extended case study. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been released. In it, several sections address climate change, mitigation, and adaptation in cities, with discussions of the crucial role of planning and governance in the same. This article offers a reflection on the urban elements of AR6, pointing to the prevalence of ideological elements in it, typologizing form over critical assessments of real conditions in developing cities. As much as AR6 emphasizes the carbon footprint of society, it ignores the social footprint of carbon and the potentially massive adjustments mitigation and adaptation will require of developing nations and their urban populations. © The Author(s) 2022.

Coastal communities in Bangladesh and around the world are at increasing risk of climate-induced disaster-shocks. In recent years, Bangladesh has been able to reduce the risk of disasters through a robust institutional intervention. It is assumed that learning from past experience has played a significant role in such risk reduction and resilience-building processes. However, how learning at multiple societal levels shapes community resilience to disaster-shocks is poorly understood. In light of this gap, the present research empirically investigates social learning at community and multiple institutional levels, and transformative learning at the individual level, from cyclonic shocks in selected coastal communities in Bangladesh. This thesis departs from the normative framing and thoughts on the relationships among learning, resilience, and DRR; it adopts a critical approach to investigate the role of learning at different levels that shapes community resilience. I followed a qualitative research approach that was supplemented by a household survey (n=240). The results revealed that the coastal communities in Bangladesh have a rich stock of indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) that helps them to generate early warnings and reduce their risk from cyclones and associated storm surges. Translation of such ILK into action often depends on the state of social memory. Formal institutional interventions often contribute to the development of negative social memory. Moreover, formal institutional interventions (e.g., NGO-led) often deny ILK a meaningful role in social learning processes. Concerning transformative learning, I further found that the relationship between transformative learning and resilience building is complex, involving multiple social-cultural-structural factors (e.g., beliefs, values, power structures), practical considerations (e.g., impact on livelihood, evacuation and relocation logistics), and cognitive factors. Regarding the multi-loop learning at

Policy is ostensibly crafted upon an overarching notion of rationality, in the form of rules, roles and designs. However, sometimes policy deviates from formal templates and seems to be guided by a different governing ethic. Rather than categorising these as policy anomalies, we can understand them as the workings of what we will refer to as a relational model of policy. The relational model describes how policy outcomes emerge from the working and reworking of relationships among policy actors. We define relationality and develop its use in policy research. While the relational can be depicted as an alternative model for policy (e.g., Confucian versus Weberian), it is more accurate to understand it as a system that complements conventional policy regimes. To illustrate the concept, we examine examples from policymaking in China. We end with a discussion of how relationality should be a general condition that should be applicable to many, if not all, policy situations. © 2020 The Author(s).

Despite decades of progress in disaster risk reduction, efforts to enhance risk awareness and influence behavioral change still seem to be falling short. When we reflect on our collective experience and envision the future of disaster risk reduction programs, we find promise in approaches that implicitly treat knowledge as not just something transmitted but as a relationship fostered with multiple publics. In this mode, the public is not simply a passive recipient of expert knowledge but a co-producer of risk knowledge. We argue that disaster risk reduction requires a reorientation based on a foundation built on three areas of research: (1) Indigenous and local knowledge, (2) social learning, and (3) narrative ways of knowing. We employ key ideas from these promising areas of research to formulate an integrative framework for the co-production of risk knowledge. Such an integrative framework can provide a powerful and useful vehicle for generating new practices around disaster risk reduction. © 2021 Elsevier Ltd

In this article, we take up the overlapping nature of crises, and reflect on the knowledge we have gained vis-a-vis learning in a time of pandemic. COVID-19 and climate change have both, in overlapping ways, changed our understanding of what constitutes just and empowering approaches to crisis risk communication. In both areas of concern, the public has had to appropriate and interpret technical knowledge, and apply the same to risk situations. At times, whether it concerns the efficacy of masks for preventing COVID-19, or evacuating ahead of an impending tropical cyclone, the public has had to become their own local experts. Our work is guided by the ethic of relationality, which eschews objectification of the public, instead aiming for their full inclusion as partners in risk reduction. The challenge is to re-orient the role of the public from a passive recipient of expert knowledge to an active agent capable of acquiring, translating, and acting upon risk information. One interesting strategy has been to craft empowerment workshops where community members gain competencies in acquiring risk knowledge and translating the same into narrative forms that they can, in turn, share with others. This was translated into a lesson plan for elementary students in Tacloban, Philippines, on the risks of storm surge. We also describe how the same lesson was repurposed for COVID-19 risk communication. The case studies speak to an emerging form of environmental education that is relevant to crises of the Anthropocene. © 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

As extreme weather events seemingly increase in frequency and magnitude, we are accumulating evidence about how the intersection of circumstances creates vulnerability. The specter of elderly residents in Brooklyn, New York, trapped in their apartments for days due to flooding from the storm surge brought by Hurricane Sandy, provides us a troubling lesson. As vulnerability emerges from the confluence of multiple factors, changing social, natural, and other factors combine to create unimagined problems. Hong Kong is a case in point. The city has seen much of its new development occurring on reclaimed coastal land. At the same time, there has been a significant demographic shift as the city’s elderly population has been its fastest growing demographic. The social transition also means more elderly persons living alone. All of these produce conditions that render the population increasingly vulnerable to coastal flooding. Yet, there is not enough systematic effort, in major cities, at identifying these vulnerabilities. Hong Kong is emblematic of coastal cities the world over, in that it has yet to come to a full realization of such emerging risks. Future research must be able to analyze intersectionalities. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

In privileging expert risk assessments, we may be failing to recognize the authenticity of a community’s actual experience of risk. We should remind ourselves that expert measures are always only partial, often surrogate, estimates of such experience and, at times, may fail to capture the actual nature of risk. There is a need for modes of analysis that allow better description of risk as experienced by community. We develop and test the methods for exploring hitherto delegitimized modes of knowing risk. In this exploratory research, narrative-linguistic analysis and cognitive mapping were used to evaluate the experience of residents near a large, municipal landfill. Text was analyzed, in part using speech-act theory. These methods aspire to thick description, as opposed experts' thin description of risk, and add to the analytical tools at our disposal. © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

All too often, warnings and evacuation advisories during extreme weather events go unheeded. Of the many issues facing risk communication, three stand out, in particular. The first concerns the problem that risk messages often do not seem self-relevant to the public. The second, related, issue is that the language is often seen as merely technical and perfunctory. The third is that, especially among marginalized population groups, too many are not reached by risk communication. The paper takes up a relational model of risk communication that seeks to frame messages as narratives each member can transmit. This model, where residents act as local expert risk communicators, has been translated into lessons for primary curricula. The idea is that students themselves can bring knowledge into homes and neighborhoods, reaching even the most excluded. The model involves democratizing risk communication, where students become teachers, and they help others become teachers as well (“teaching to the nth”). We implement the model in a primary school in Leyte province, Philippines. Initial results are encouraging, and the paper concludes with further discussion of the broader applications of the relational model for disaster risk reduction. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd

Each year, lives are needlessly lost to floods due to residents failing to heed evacuation advisories. Risk communication research suggests that flood warnings need to be more vivid, contextualized, and visualizable, in order to engage the message recipient. This paper makes the case for the development of a low-cost augmented reality tool that enables individuals to visualize, at close range and in three-dimension, their homes, schools, and places of work and worship subjected to flooding (modeled upon a series of federally expected flood hazard levels). This paper also introduces initial tool development in this area and the related data input stream. © 2020 International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. All rights reserved.

So long as transaction costs are low, the creation of a tradeable permit to emit carbon should allow bargaining for emission rights among buyers and sellers, resulting in an efficient allocation of carbon emission rights. However, the trading of carbon credits may have socially unjust consequences. In this article, we explore some hitherto unrecognized disequities. One of these may be the creation of toxic hotspots as the trade of carbon may bring with it a transfer of air toxics, as well. We illustrate the argument by examining emissions from refineries participating in California’s cap-and-trade program. These considerations are a concern for the larger question of carbon mitigation as the global community strives to identify feasible, yet just, approaches to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Contrary to the idea of alienable rights, the transfer of carbon affects people and place in ways not internalized by these market instruments. © Copyright © 2020 Lejano, Kan and Chau.

Narrative is the stuff of community. The Power of Narrative embarks on a quest to understand how narrative works in taking an inchoate group of individuals and turning it into a powerful social movement. To understand the force of narrative, the authors examine the particular phenomenon of climate skepticism. Somehow, the narrative of climate skepticism has been able to forge a movement and stake a challenge to the hegemony of the larger community of scientists on what is ostensibly a matter of science. The book asks: How is this achieved? What is the narrative of climate skepticism, and how has it evolved over time and diffused from place to place? Is it possible that this narrative shares with other issue narratives an underlying genetic code of sorts, a story that is more fundamental than all of these? How has the climate skeptical narrative contended with its other, which is the narrative-network of climate change science, and forged its own social movement? The outcome of this struggle between climate science and its denial has implications for society that go far beyond climatology. Using narrative and discourse analysis, the authors demonstrate how the narrative lens allows us unique insights into these questions. The book takes the reader on a journey, across times and places and social realms; throughout, we see the power of narrative at work, making believers, or skeptics, of us all. © Oxford University Press 2020.

There are many reasons that people, when warned of an impending extreme event, do not take proactive, self-defensive action. We focus on one possible reason, which is that, sometimes, people lack a sense of agency or even experience disempowerment, which can lead to passivity. This article takes up one situation where the possibility of disempowerment is salient, that of Rohingya refugees who were evicted from their homes in Myanmar and forced to cross the border into neighboring Bangladesh. In their plight, we see the twin elements of marginalization and displacement acting jointly to produce heightened vulnerability to the risks from extreme weather. Building on a relational model of risk communication, a consortium of researchers and practitioners designed a risk communication training workshop that featured elements of empowerment-based practice. The program was implemented in two refugee camps. Evaluation suggests that the workshop may have had an appreciable effect in increasing participants' sense of agency and hope, while decreasing their level of fatalism. The outcomes were considerably more positive for female than male participants, which has important implications. This work underscores the potential for participatory modes of risk communication to empower the more marginalized, and thus more vulnerable, members of society. © 2020 Society for Risk Analysis