title: Effective Community Engagement Approaches for Climate Change Adaptation in the Philippines
Creators: name: Baybay, Carla Selina Q
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2020
Subjects: subject: Philippines
subject: climate change

description: As interconnected knowledge and policy priorities, the Philippines needs to develop more effective community engagement approaches and policies—particularly for its highly vulnerable coastal communities—to better enable robust local responses to climate change impacts, with increasing extreme weather events highlighted. Several social and policy barriers currently impede the development of more proactive and robust adaptation approaches at the community level. They comprise persistent top-down decision-making and planning approaches, poor institutional capacity, conflicting social power dynamics at the local level, and complex social, economic, and cultural community relations. In such context, this thesis advances a highly considered best option for effectivecommunity engagement approach/es to better increase adaptive capacity to climate change in the Philippines, based on knowledge building and practice. To reach this conclusion, the research involved three stages of investigation. First, an extensive literature review, as informed by the areas of environmental management, climate change adaptation, disaster risk reduction and management, community engagement, and local knowledge, in both international and Philippine contexts. Secondly, development of a conceptual framework to more clearly understand the relationship between community engagement and the Philippines context of climate change adaptation, assisted by the broader international context. The conceptual framework consisted of a synthesis of three meta-themes, and numerous themes informing them, as drawn from the existing theory and empirical research on the topic: (i) community engagement and climate change adaptation in international contexts; (ii) local knowledge and climate change adaptation; and (iii) community engagement and climate change adaptation in the Philippine context. Third, empirical data as collected through interviews with 24 local experts and focus group discussions with 91 community representatives in two disaster-prone research sites. More exactly, 11 local experts and 38 community representatives from Sorsogon City, and 13 local experts and 53 community representatives from the Municipality of Lavezares; as provinces on the eastern seaboard highly subject to extreme weather events with contrasting weak and strong community engagement styles for climate change adaptation. All participants had relevant knowledge and experience on community engagement for climate change adaptation, disaster risk reduction and management, and other related environmental issues typically experienced by Philippine coastal communities. The findings revealed that both strong (inclusive and active) and weak (passive and inactive) community engagement approaches for climate change adaptation (and by association, disaster risk reduction and management) existed in the Philippines, as wellevidenced by the representative case studies of Sorsogon City and the Municipality of Lavezares regarding community, government, and non-government-based initiatives and actions. Strong community engagement approaches pertained to (i) community capacity building; (ii) knowledge and awareness; (iii) community support; (iv) input in decisionmaking processes; and (v) community characteristics of unity, empowerment, and positive traditional Filipino community engagement practices. While participants recognised the contribution of strong community engagement to climate change adaptation, weak community engagement approaches reflected participatory barriers of (i) poverty and lack of funding and budget; (ii) disunity, class conflict, and a culture of dependency; (iii) top-down approaches to decision-making; and (iv) political affiliations and unequal social power dynamics. Concomitantly, information dissemination mechanisms, as traditionally weak community engagement, was mostly regarded as a precursor to strong approaches. Similarly, community-based consultations were considered as strong approaches when transparency and open communication were enabled at the community level, to better contribute meaningful input to decision-making processes. In turn, participants suggested four key conduits to strengthen community engagement for climate change adaptation: (i) community capacity building and empowerment; (ii) socio-cultural community and place-based contexts; (iii) leadership and good governance; and (iv) multi-stakeholder and sectoral networks, partnerships, and linkages. Knowledge integration was also emphasised, as was broader intra-jurisdictional coherence involving good governance principles. Positive community characteristics and practices such as bayanihan and pintakasi were also regarded as crucial for strong community engagement. However, in adopting such suggestions, local governments, communities, and NGOs would need to exercise vigilance as these practices can be misused or manipulated by those in power to the disadvantage of those engaging. Overall, the strong community engagement approach was found the best approach for Philippine coastal communities to build effective climate change adaptation to build more robust local adaptive capacity and resilience. That said, the thesis makes an original contribution to the literature in three ways. First, by consolidating the diverse meanings and interpretations of community engagement found in the literature into two broad approaches: ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ community engagement. Second, by comparing community engagement experiences in climate change adaptation involving local governments and communities specifically in the Philippine context. Third, by strongly contributing to the relevant and existing knowledge and practices in the Philippines for strengthening the policy development process of climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction and management policies (with a flow-on knowledge contribution to the international literature). This contribution was based on many policy insights generated through dialogue in the Philippines with policy actors and practitioners involved in policy design, particularly regarding communities and local governments. Key policy suggestions included integration of socio-cultural and place-based contexts of communities in policy processes, established political leadership and government and community structures, policy coherence across all governmental levels, increased budget allocation at the local level, and strengthening community engagement approaches for interrelated climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction and management in the Philippines; which also appears to have wide applicability elsewhere.