Natural Hazards Observer
| November 2004 | Volume XXIX | Number 2 |
Invited Comment
Building Researcher and Practitioner Coalitions: Safeguarding Our Future Against Disasters
The multidisciplinary nature of disaster management requires strong links between research and practice. However, today’s experienced disaster managers have rarely been introduced to the profession through the halls of academia. Researchers, whose work is very much needed in this field, are often not invited, encouraged, nor find it practical to become engaged in disaster management projects at the planning level. Thus, research and disaster risk reduction planning at the community level have been forcibly linked. As developing science and technology endeavors evolve to provide disaster management practitioners with advanced analytic tools and solutions for situational awareness, planning, and decision making, strengthening this link becomes vital to saving lives and reducing losses. Building a researcher-practitioner-stakeholder coalition that brings the parties together is critical for effective disaster mitigation planning and community safety.
In the United States, opportunities for researcher-practitioner-stakeholder interactions have become more widespread as a result of community-based risk planning projects, which are required by the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000. Likewise in Asia, the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance has funded the Asian Urban Disaster Mitigation Program, which has had positive planning effects in 10 Asian countries. With a congressional mandate to engage in activities and partnerships that provide products and services for emergency managers in the Asia-Pacific region, the Pacific Disaster Center (PDC) in Hawaii has led the development of several community-based risk planning projects and training programs for island and urban environments in the United States and the Asia-Pacific region.
Building a Researcher-Practitioner-Stakeholder Coalition
The PDC’s program has promoted research into practice by integrating its research teams into local government organizational frameworks that include a broad coalition of stakeholders (see figure below). Such an arrangement sustains mitigation planning activities beyond the scope of the project by identifying and mobilizing accessible local resources available to a community. The framework includes Geographic Information System (GIS) stakeholders that often provide a natural link between the research and practitioner communities. These stakeholder coalitions have fostered knowledge transfer environments where risk managers have increasingly shown a willingness to seek information from scientists, engineers, and GIS data managers on local, national, and regional levels. These stakeholder coalitions also offer scientists an understanding of practitioners’ needs.
Community-Based Project Organization. Using a city example, this organizational structure integrates research teams with local practitioners and stakeholders.
Inherent Communication GapsCommunication between researchers and practitioners has remained an impediment to achieving effective disaster mitigation knowledge transfer to the community level. This is because researchers and practitioners tend to communicate very differently as a result of differences in audience, comfort with uncertainty, vocabulary, and associations. Generally, scientists communicate mainly with peer technical communities, have a low comfort with uncertainty, use a complex vocabulary, and associate with technical groups. On the other hand, practitioners and public decision makers communicate with a broader public, often have a much higher tolerance for uncertainty, use a simpler vocabulary, and associate in public settings.
Also, the two worlds of science and practice differ because the rewards systems for the two worlds differ. In order to create a bridge, we should explore improving the rewards systems of universities and science organizations by rewarding interdisciplinary research and applied projects that meet practitioners’ needs. Such a rewards system could operate in parallel with the current peer review reward systems.
Dialogue Between Theory and PracticeIn academic research, the primary means of validating new research and findings is the peer review process, submitting articles or proposals to peers in the field for review and comment. Decisions regarding funding for new research or publication of findings from research undertaken are based to a large extent on the assessment of the merit of the question and the validity of methods and findings as determined by recognized peers in the field. The review is blind to ensure candor and protect confidentiality of authors and reviewers. This method of validation depends upon a recognized set of professional standards and responsible performance by members of the profession.
For the most part, this method of validating scientific work operates reasonably well, but like all human-designed processes, it is subject to distortion, particularly when it comes to innovative or interdisciplinary work. There tends to be an inherently conservative bias in the peer review process, similar to the “increasing returns” argument of economists studying complex systems; that is, researchers whose work is reviewed favorably and published in prestigious journals tend to be regarded more favorably in the next review process. Those researchers who are breaking new ground, especially in crossing interdisciplinary boundaries, as is almost always the case in hazards and disaster management research, tend to be held to a more rigorous standard by colleagues in single disciplines, especially if their findings contradict mainline theories in one or another of the disciplines they are using to frame their research questions.
A vital voice in this dialogue is that of experienced practitioners, who see the problems emerge in complex environments and can lend a critical perspective that grounds the problem in practice. The real test of theory is whether it explains practice, and the validation of results by experienced practitioners is an important component of building good theory. Including insights from experienced practitioners throughout the research process—from formulation of research questions to periodic checks on the conduct of research to validation of research findings—will strengthen our coalitions and accelerate the research knowledge transfer process to community stakeholders.
Programs Promoting Research into PracticeBelow are four programs that bring together disaster management practitioners and researchers.
- U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Science Impact Program. This program is a focused effort to improve and expand the use of the USGS’ science to support societal decision making. Primary research focuses on linkages between science and decision making and the development of applications and decision support tools.
- National Science Foundation Programs (NSF). The NSF promotes projects that seek outcomes beneficial to the practitioner community. Currently, NSF review guidelines require proposals to be evaluated on only two criteria: intellectual merit and broader impacts. The latter includes impacts upon society and the potential for knowledge dissemination and use by practitioners.
- Earthquakes and Megacities Initiative. On a global scale, this initiative has effectively linked researchers and practitioners in 17 cities since 1997 through a cluster cities arrangement and serves as a model for linking researchers with practitioners.
- Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Higher Education Project. Over the past decade, this project funded curriculum development to establish disaster management degree programs within U.S. institutions. It ensures that the next generation of disaster managers will be trained professionals matriculating from academic institutions where disaster managers have fully integrated research, science, and technology into the policy-development and decision-making processes.
In summary, in the ongoing effort to safeguard our future against disasters, the importance of strong working relationships between research and practice cannot be overlooked. As outlined in this article, improvements upon these relationships can be made by building coalitions, closing the communication gap, developing new reward systems that recognize interdisciplinary efforts, loosening the strictures of the peer review process to include practitioners, and learning from the experiences of others. The two groups have the same goals. It is time they worked together to achieve them.
Jim Buika
Pacific Disaster Center
Louise Comfort
University of Pittsburgh
Additional Contributors:
Carl Shapiro
United States Geological Survey
Dennis Wenger
National Science Foundation
http://www.pdc.org/
Pacific Disaster Center
http://www.iisis.pitt.edu/
Interactive, Intelligent, Spatial Information System, University of Pittsburgh
http://www.usgs.gov/science_impact/
United States Geological Survey Science Impact Program
http://www.nsf.gov/
National Science Foundation
http://www.earthquakesandmegacities.org/
Earthquakes and Megacities Initiative
http://training.fema.gov/EMIWeb/edu/
Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Higher Education Project
The Public Health Risk of Disasters:
Building Response Capacity
In the wake of 9/11, the need for enhanced collaboration and coordination among all stakeholders involved in emergency management and response has assumed heightened urgency. While public health risks have always been associated with disasters, the previously inconceivable tactics used by terrorists on that date, along with the subsequent introduction of anthrax into the U.S. Postal System one month later, demonstrated that the United States is clearly vulnerable to human-induced disasters that pose even greater health risks than previously contemplated.
To prepare for such threats, local, state, and federal government officials have been working to integrate and rapidly disperse response assets by developing the National Response Plan, a single, unified, comprehensive national plan. Also, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recognizes the importance of incorporating health care system response plans into health department plans and now requires that the two be considered together for government-funded preparedness activities.
Having a multidisciplinary preparedness plan is only a part of disaster impact reduction. Effective communication before, during, and after disasters to culturally diverse audiences of wide-ranging scientific literacy is critical to any preparedness effort. To disseminate emergency risk communication messages rapidly, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has established a communications center with videoconferencing capabilities. In addition, the CDC has enhanced its capacity to rapidly communicate directly with physicians, which is important because Americans generally rely on their physicians to provide accurate, urgent health information.
The United States is currently better prepared to respond to the health risks of disasters than it was three years ago. However, in order to bring the full range of the nation’s preparedness capabilities to bear, further collaborations among industry, nongovernmental organizations, and members of the engineering, scientific, and academic communities are necessary to successfully prevent and mitigate the health effects of disasters.
The National Research Council’s Disasters Roundtable recently convened a workshop on these topics to discuss America’s capacity to respond to the health risks of disasters. A workshop summary is available at http://dels.nas.edu/dr/ or by contacting Melissa Cole, National Research Council, 500 5th Street NW, Washington, DC 20001; e-mail: mcole@post.harvard.edu.