Evaluation and SOTA Summary Report (Citizens)
Creators: name: Vangelis Pitidis (UoW)
name: Jon Coaffee (UoW)
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023
Subjects: Risk Communication, Risk Perception

description: Deliverable 2.1 illuminates how collecting and analysing data in novel ways is capable of generating new knowledge and stimulating new practices that are sensitive to the Risk Perception Action Gap (RPAG), as well as enhancing community resilience approaches. To frame this process of enhancing both disaster resilience (see also D1.2) and community resilience and bridging the RPAG, the extant literature is explored through predominantly desk-based research on three distinct but interrelated concepts: community resilience, community risk perception and citizen generated data in order to: 1. Lay the conceptual foundations of terms frequently used in the project, such as : community resilience, community risk perception and citizen generated data. 2. Produce working definitions of community resilience and of risk perception that will be adopted for the duration of the project. 3. Generate a knowledge-base of good practices and State-Of-The-Art regarding the utilisation of citizen genrated data and other digital technologies for bridging the RPAG and enhancing community resilience. Following an introduction and proceeded by an overall concluding section, D2.1 is divided into three main conceptual chapters (2, 3 and 4), each focused on one of the three above mentioned major concepts. In Chapter 2, community resilience is approached from an academic perspective, as a conceptual amalgam of previously presented epistemologies of resilience across different disciplinary and conceptual boundaries, constituting the ontological outcome of the ‘social turn’ in resilience scholarship. Building on this accumulated knowledge of resilience literature in academia and practice, and combining it with definitions of resilience (mainly disaster and community oriented ones) across a variety of EU-funded projects, we introduce a working definition of the term for RiskPACC, emphasising the key role of human agency and active citizenship while also highlighting the importance of communication channels and ‘trust-ties’ between communities and other local stakeholders. The working definItion of community resilence used for RiskPACC is: The capacity of communities and individuals to interact with their surrounding physical and built environment, comprehend risk and actively mobilise activities to enhance societal connectedness including the use of digital technologies, to co-produce knowledge and build two-way communication channels with the CPAs and other local stakeholders to cope with, adapt to, prepare for and recover from external perturbations or inherent stresses. Following the introduction and consolidation of the working definition for community resilience, Chapter 3 explores community risk perception in extant academic literature and its transtition from a predominantly phychology-oriented to a more sociological concept, whilst illuminating the gap between how experts and lay people perceive risk. The relationship of community risk perception with place is also discussed, as well as its influence during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, D2.1 Month 4 6 | Page Dissemination Level: PU This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101021271 eventually justifying the adoption of the European Environment Agency definition of the term as a working definition for RiskPACC : Risk perception involves people’s beliefs, attitudes, judgements and feelings, as well as the wider social or cultural values that people adopt towards hazards and their benefits. The way in which people perceive risk is vital in the process of assessing and managing risk. Risk perception will be a major determinant in whether a risk is deemed to be "acceptable" and whether the risk management measures imposed are seen to resolve the problem. Here, beyond specific aspects of risk perception, significant attention is also paid in the understanding of the risk context (events and policies) and environmental conditions and constraints, thus foregrounding the importance of situating people in their socio-political/community context, instead of merely viewing them as independent individuals. Moreover, the role of trust in influencing the degree to which citizens believe and act upon communications from CPAs is also emphasised. Complementing this focus on local responses, Chapter 4 focuses on citizen generated data, including social media, and their potentialities for supporting disaster resilience (including improving disaster response) and enhancing community resilience. More specifically, VGI is prioritised as an emerging digital technological trend, while its relevance for engaging local communities in decisionmaking for disaster resilience, and bridging the RPAG, is also emphasised. The analysis in D2.1 has generated a robust knowledge-base that will support the development of the project’s practical Framework (WP4) and digital tooled solutions based on new forms of digital and community-centred data (WP5), and will ultimately feed into the development of the “RiskPack” toolbox/package of solutions (WPs 5,6 and 7). Summing up, the key findings of this Report are the following: • Community resilience is a contested term that emphasises human agency, mobilisation of social capital and the strengthening of communication channels and (in)formal institutions in the process of coping with, adapting to, preparing for and recovering from external perturbations or inherent stresses. • Understanding, capturing and acknowledging community risk perception and aligning it with CPAs’ conceptualisations of risk is fundamental for bridging the RPAG. Digital technologies such as citizen generated data, VGI and social media can support the process of capturing risk perception and thus contribute to the bridging of the RPAG, enhancing community resilience and improving overall disaster resilience.