Chapter 12 Community Organizing and Participation

• Policy makers
• Lead disaster agency
• Local officials
• Project managers
• Affected communities
  

Guiding Principles for Community Organization and Participation

• Reconstruction begins at the community level. A good reconstruction strategy engages communities and helps people work together to rebuild their housing, their lives, and their livelihoods.
• Community-based approaches require a somewhat different programming flow that begins with mobilizing social groups and communities and having the community conduct its own assessment.
• A very strong commitment and leadership from the top are needed to implement a bottom-up approach, because pressure is strong in an emergency to provide rapid, top-town, autocratic solutions.
• “The community” is not a monolith, but a complex organism with many alliances and subgroups. The community needs to be engaged in order to identify concerns, goals, and abilities, but there may not be consensus on these items.
• The scale at which community engagement is most effective may be quite small, for example, as few as 10 families.
• Engagement of the community may bring out different preferences and expectations, so agencies involved in reconstruction must be open to altering their preconceived vision of the reconstruction process.
• Numerous methods exist for community participation, but they need to be adapted to the context, and nearly all require facilitation and other forms of support.
• Transparency and effective communication are essential to maintaining engagement and credibility with the community and within the community during the reconstruction process.
• The reconstruction approach may affect the type and level of direct participation in reconstruction.
  

Community engagement has numerous benefits and is critical in every stage of post-disaster recovery and reconstruction. This chapter encourages agencies involved in reconstruction to offer affected communities a range of options for involvement in reconstruction.^[3] It addresses the organization of affected communities and participation by individuals, communities, and community-based organizations (CBOs). (See Chapter 14, International, National, and Local Partnerships in Reconstruction, for a typology of civil society institutions that participate in reconstruction.)

1. The lead disaster agency should work with affected communities, local government, and agencies involved in reconstruction to define the role of communities in planning and managing reconstruction. The agreements that emerge from this dialogue should be an integral part of the reconstruction policy.
2. Affected communities should decide how they will organize themselves to participate in the reconstruction effort.
3. Agencies involved in reconstruction should decide how they will support and empower communities to play the roles they have agreed to take on, and how two-way communication with communities will be established and maintained throughout reconstruction.
4. Local government should define its role(s) in supporting reconstruction at the community level, in consultation with affected communities, the lead disaster agency, and agencies involved in reconstruction.
5. Agencies involved in reconstruction should decide with communities how to monitor and evaluate the involvement of the community in reconstruction to ensure that agreements regarding role(s) and responsibilities are fulfilled on all sides. This monitoring should take place at both the community level and at the national level for the overall reconstruction program.
   

Experience is increasingly demonstrating that an emergency is the time to expand, rather than reduce, participation, even if there is no formal policy framework for participation in place. By including properly structured community participation mechanisms, physical outcomes and the quality of oversight can actually be improved, especially when large sums of money are involved. Local and international NGOs and other agencies involved in reconstruction can help operationalize these mechanisms. Or local government may be able to establish the guidelines and coordinate community participation in reconstruction. The role of local government is especially critical when local land use decisions and infrastructure reconstruction are involved.

If government is reticent to take a decentralized, participatory approach, agencies with experience in participatory approaches to reconstruction may want to present concrete examples of where these efforts have been successful in an effort to advocate for this approach on behalf of communities. A number of examples of good practice are included in the case studies below.

Source: Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian (ALNAP), 2003, Participation by Crisis-Affected Populations in Humanitarian Action: A Handbook for Practitioners (London: Overseas Development Institute), http://www.alnap.org/publications/gs_handbook/gs_handbook.pdf.  

• Analyzing: Identifying the strengths and weaknesses of existing policies and service and support systems
• Setting objectives: Deciding and articulating what is needed
• Creating strategy: Deciding, in pragmatic terms, directions, priorities, and institutional responsibilities
• Formulating tactics: Developing or overseeing the development of project policies, specifications, blueprints, budgets, and technologies needed to move from the present to the future
• Monitoring: Conducting social assessments or other forms of monitoring of project expenditures and outputs
  

Other agencies have more expansive views of participation. Participation is known to have outcomes that are social in nature: empowering individuals, increasing local capacity, strengthening democratic processes, and giving voice to marginalized groups. Another set of benefits has to do with program effectiveness and leverage: creating a sense of ownership, improving program quality, mobilizing resources, and stimulating community involvement in execution.

This mobilization may be more or less difficult, depending on the impact of the disaster and the nature of the pre-existing organization of the community. Communication with the community is a critical element of a successful participatory process. See Chapter 3, Communication in Post-Disaster Reconstruction, for extensive guidance on post-disaster communication.

The case study on the 2006 Java earthquake reconstruction, below, demonstrates how the reconstruction of thousands of housing units was managed by communities.

Conventionally trained planners may need to adjust their thinking in order to successfully participate in this type of reconstruction project. Also, because the success of this type of approach depends on community decision making, assistance may be needed to restart institutional mechanisms for consensual decision making and to establish or reestablish other governance structures.

An exemplary case of community participation in post-disaster planning is described below in the case study on the 2003 Bam earthquake reconstruction.

The reconstruction approach. The housing reconstruction approach will affect the level and type of community participation. Chapter 6, Reconstruction Approaches, discusses five approaches to reconstruction. Of those five, the Cash Approach (CA), Owner-Driven Reconstruction (ODR), and Community-Driven Reconstruction (CDR) offer the greatest opportunity for direct involvement in housing reconstruction. Owners have some limited opportunities for involvement in a Agency-Driven Reconstruction In-Situ (ADRIS) project; however, Agency-Driven Reconstruction in Relocated Site (ADRRS) largely excludes an owner from any role in the rebuilding effort. Housing reconstruction and infrastructure reconstruction offer different opportunities for community involvement that should be coordinated, but identified, planned, and managed separately.^[5]

Training and facilitation. Training and facilitation are key ingredients of a participatory approach to reconstruction. Communities need training that supports their particular role(s). Training in housing reconstruction methods is important if community members are acting as builders or overseeing housing reconstruction (see Chapter 16, Training Requirements in Reconstruction). If supervision of infrastructure projects is a community responsibility, some members will need training to understand plans and specifications. Facilitation is different from training, but is also critically important. Facilitation involves activities that help the community reestablish their decision-making processes, develop and implement plans, get access to resources, resolve conflicts, etc. Finding, training, and keeping good community facilitators are absolutely critical roles for government and agencies involved in participatory community-based reconstruction. Expect turnover in the ranks of facilitators, since it is a demanding job and requires establishing a rapport with the specific community. The experience with the use of facilitators in the Yogyakarta earthquake reconstruction is summarized in Annex 1 of this chapter entitled How to Do It: Establishing a Community Facilitation System for Post-Disaster Housing and Community Reconstruction.

The enabling environment. The term “enabling environment” as used here means the rules and regulations, both national and local, that provide the freedom and incentives for people to participate. Examining the legal framework within which affected beneficiaries and communities operate will identify any legal constraints that must be addressed to permit genuine participation. There are at least three important considerations: whether the community has access to information, whether the community has the right to organize and enter into contractual agreements, and the project approach taken by agencies involved in reconstruction.^[6]

Reconstruction agency constraints. The participatory process can be affected by constraints emanating from agencies involved in reconstruction, including enormous time pressure and political pressure to resolve the housing problem and create on-the-ground results; a lack of commitment, skills, or capacity to conduct participatory reconstruction activities; operating with a short-term emergency mind-set rather than a development perspective; and an inability to make a long-term commitment to a community because of the nature of the agency’s programs. Agencies involved in reconstruction may also have a limited understanding of the context, especially if it is complex or changing rapidly, and may therefore be reticent to make plans with the community when the outcomes are unpredictable.[7] A committee of agency and affected community representatives could be created specifically to monitor the quality of participation in reconstruction and to address community grievances related to this issue. Community participation can take time, but time is also lost if opposition to projects arises because the community was excluded. In the 1993 Latur earthquake reconstruction, government–recognizing the limits of its capacity to manage participation–appointed two respected nongovernmental organizations to assist them, as described in the case study, below.

Organization of the community. A community’s organization can be invisible to outsiders, but tools such as community assessments and institutional mapping can help reveal it and any effects it may have on a proposed project.^[8] A range of organizations with various degrees of formal structure are already operating in any given community, performing a variety of functions, including channeling community demands.^[9] Planning intervention without understanding this reality not only is disrespectful of the community, but can also create conflicts and lead to unexpected delays or even rejection of the project. The sponsors of any new initiative—even if it is just a single project that seeks the community’s participation—need to decide how the project will relate to the community as it is already organized. As early as possible, an analysis should be carried out of the community’s characteristics, including its organizational structure and its capabilities. The methodology described in  Annex 2 to this chapter, How to Do It: Developing a Community Participation Profile, will provide input needed to make decisions about the demand and starting point for community participation.

The existing organizational structure may be based on wealth, political party, caste, culture, or power relationships, among other things. Self-appointed spokespeople for the community and organizations that claim to be representative of local community needs and aspirations, including national NGOs, may not be seen as such by members of the community. The role of women will need to be carefully considered in planning reconstruction, and women’s organizations may have an important role to play. The case study on the 1992 Pakistan floods describes how a local NGO, PATTAN, worked to broaden women’s role in reconstruction.

Formalizing community involvement. For community-based reconstruction, community contracts are a tool developed by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) to establish the terms of community involvement.^[10] The formalization of the involvement of NGOs is addressed in Chapter 14, International, National, and Local Partnerships in Reconstruction.

It is not necessary to create participatory processes; over the years, organizations have systematized myriad instruments and methodologies that can be adapted to the context in which the participation will take place. The table below contains examples.^[11]

Stakeholder involvement is context specific; thus, who needs to or is willing to be involved varies from one project to another. The figure below depicts a common set of project stakeholders. The table below uses a hypothetical project (helping a community avoid relocation by implementing structural measures to reduce risk) to show common stakeholder categories.

The level of power, interests, and resources of each stakeholder will affect that stakeholder’s ability to collaborate. Therefore, an environment needs to be created in which stakeholders can participate and interact as equals. Consensus-building is not always easy; specific measures may need to be taken to promote negotiation and resolve disputes.

Stakeholders of a project may not all have equal status, because they have different “stakes” in project outcomes. For instance, the head of a household that may be relocated has more invested in the outcome of a relocation project than the representative of the local planning department, although both are considered stakeholders.

Source: ALNAP, 2003, Participation by Crisis-Affected Populations in Humanitarian Action: A Handbook for Practitioners (London: Overseas Development Institute), http://www.alnap.org/publications/gs_handbook/gs_handbook.pdf.

The organization and facilitation of community participation should not be done on a purely ad hoc basis. Trained facilitators and other experts in community participation should be part of the management team for any project that entails participation.

• Government forgoing genuine participation, due to political and social pressures to show that the reconstruction process is advancing.
• Lack of support by the community for the reconstruction project because of limited involvement of stakeholders, particularly the affected community, in planning and design.
• Failing to understand the complexity of community involvement and believing that “the community” is a unified, organized body. 
• Ignoring how the community is already organized when introducing participatory activities.
• Underestimating the time and cost of genuine participatory processes.
• Conducting poorly organized opinion surveys and believing that the responses to those surveys are representative of the community.
• Failing to find or develop facilitators and trainers who understand and believe in the community-based approach.
• Rejecting established models of community organization—or, alternatively, blindly adopting models from other countries or contexts—without evaluating how they should or could be adapted to the specific conditions of the locality in question.
• Thinking that all community organizations are democratic and representative, or forgetting that they have their own agendas.
• Confusing the role of national NGOs with that of genuine CBOs.
• Agencies believing that they are being participatory by establishing a relationship with one specific local organization or spokesperson.
  

1. Analyze the community’s capacity and preferences for participation by working with the community to carry out a Community Participation Profile early in the reconstruction process.
2. Work with the community to reach agreement not only on how it will organize itself, but also on activities and outcomes, i.e., the reconstruction priorities, projects, and goals.
3. Find the right scale for community involvement, which may be smaller than expected.
4. Provide the facilitation and support to make the community an effective actor in reconstruction, and involve the community in monitoring the quality of this support. There will be turnover in the ranks of facilitators, so providing the community with proper support is a continuous process.
5. Consider creating a monitoring mechanism with representation from both the agencies involved in reconstruction and the community, specifically to monitor the quality of community involvement.
6. Do not hesitate to demand good governance and accountability from the community, especially if funding is involved.
7. Do not disempower existing community initiatives by introducing new and unfamiliar organizational structures that compete; find ways to combine forces.
8. Consider using existing tools that foster participation, but make sure that they are adapted to the project and context.
9. Understand that stakeholder identification is one of the most important steps in a participatory process; use participatory methods to identify and engage stakeholders.
10. Understand that community participation can have unintended consequences. Maintain a constructive relationship with participants, and look for opportunities to support additional activities that spin off from the original participatory process.
    

Somewhat hidden from the world by the ongoing flurry of Aceh tsunami recovery, the 2006 Java earthquake with a magnitude of 6.3 on the Richter scale was nevertheless an enormously destructive event. Over 350,000 residential units were lost and 5,760 persons were killed, most from the collapse of non-engineered masonry structures. Using lessons learned from the tsunami experience and resources from the ongoing Urban Poverty Project (UPP), the Indonesian government was able to respond quickly and efficiently. Facilitators were recruited and villages elected boards of trustees, which later were instrumental in organizing community meetings and supervising implementation. Key activities included (1) identifying beneficiaries and prioritizing the most vulnerable; (2) establishing housing groups of 10-15 families, who chose their leaders and a treasurer; (3) developing detailed plans to use the construction grants for each group; (4) opening group bank accounts; and (5) obtaining approval of plans, disbursement in tranches, and group procurement, construction, and bookkeeping. Training was provided to community members and local workers to ensure earthquake-resistant construction. Later, the community developed plans to rebuild village infrastructure and facilities, with a particular focus on disaster resilience. Communities conducted self-surveys, prepared thematic maps, analyzed needs and disaster risks, agreed on priority programs, and established procedures for operations and maintenance. Grants for infrastructure were also disbursed in tranches through the selected bank as work progressed.

An adequate understanding of rules and a sense of ownership by the community were essential to ensuring good targeting and plans, accountability, and social control of implementation. The involvement of women increased accountability and enhanced the appropriateness of technical solutions. The role of facilitators was crucial, as they both ensured effective communication and adaptability of the program to local situations as well as compliance with program principles. In all 6,480 core houses were funded by a World Bank loan under UPP, and another 15,153 units were funded by the multi-donor Java Reconstruction Fund. This approach to reconstruction became the model for the much larger government-financed rehabilitation and reconstruction program, under which about 200,000 houses were rebuilt in Java.

Sources: Sri Probo Sudarmo, World Bank, 2009, personal communication; and World Bank, 2007, Community-Based Settlement Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Project for Central and West Java and Yogyakarta Special Region, project documents, http://web.worldbank.org/external/projects/main?pagePK=64283627&piPK=73230&theSitePK=226309&menuPK=287103&Projectid=P103457.

Northern Pakistan’s catastrophic floods in 1992 were attributed to large-scale deforestation in mountainous watersheds, and led eventually to government imposing a ban on commercial harvesting of forests. After the floods, PATTAN, a local NGO, introduced a number of measures that specifically addressed women’s issues in the disaster recovery process. Female relief workers were engaged to assess the needs of women after the floods and to involve them in the planning, implementation, and rehabilitation activities. Local women were registered as heads of their households to help ensure efficient distribution of relief food. Village women’s organizations were established (in parallel with men’s groups) to articulate women’s needs and to take responsibility for community development. These groups also provided a forum for discussing women’s views regarding the design and layout of new houses. As a result, women became actively involved in reconstruction activities. Later, women were made responsible for collecting money to repay loan installments on the houses. Some women also participated in construction, traditionally a male activity. Perhaps most important, PATTAN introduced the concept that married couples should own houses jointly.

Source: World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization, and International Fund for Agricultural Development, 2008, Gender in Agriculture Sourcebook (Washington, DC: World Bank), http://publications.worldbank.org/ecommerce/catalog/product?item_id=8612687.

With the help of the World Bank, the government of Maharashtra, India, developed the Maharashtra Emergency Earthquake Rehabilitation Program (MEERP), which institutionalized community participation and ensured that beneficiaries were formally consulted at all stages of the post-earthquake program. Every village created a local committee headed by the sarpanch (the head of the village council), and its subcommittees included women and disadvantaged groups. Consultative committees were also proposed at the level of the taluka (an administrative unit that includes several villages) and the district. To ensure the village-level committees interacted with the project management unit at all levels, government took an innovative step and appointed two respected community organizations to carry out the process, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and the Society for Promotion of Resource Area Centre.

Source: Rohit Jigyasu, 2002, “Reducing Disaster Vulnerability through Local Knowledge and Capacity” (PhD thesis, Trondheim: Norwegian University of Science and Technology), http://ntnu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?searchId=1&pid=diva2:123824.  

After the 2003 earthquake in Bam, Iran, a national strategy for housing reconstruction was published. For urban areas, the strategy featured (1) provision of interim or transitional shelters on existing vacant lots, including the distribution of prefabricated units to address housing needs for a 2-year period; and (2) provision of permanent shelter after preparation of a detailed city master plan and the approval of technologies and legal and procedural mechanisms for reconstruction.

The provision of interim shelter in the city of Bam gave government time to revise the existing city plan before beginning reconstruction. The most recent Bam City Master Plan had been developed by a consulting firm and approved by the High Council of Architecture and Urban Development of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development in the year prior to the earthquake. However, the disaster raised significant new issues, so the same consulting firm was brought back to update the plan. A comprehensive survey sought inputs from local authorities, implementing agencies, community leaders, NGOs, women, youth, and children.

In April 2004, the Housing Foundation of the Islamic Revolution-United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) joint housing project organized a technical consultation in which UNDP; the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF); the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); the World Health Organization (WHO); the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO); and other UN agencies provided technical assistance and capacity building for the participatory city micro-planning process, to explain such concepts as child-friendly and healthy cities and to discuss the socioeconomic aspects of city planning. The final Structure Plan specifically addressed the need to respect the traditional architecture and urban design of the city and villages, to protect buffer zones, to minimize relocation, and to minimize expropriation through reuse of land. This plan formed the basis for subsequent detailed planning of 11 priority reconstruction areas in the city of Bam. To reduce the chance of excessive uniformity, each area had a different planning team. The modified plan and detailed plans were ratified by the High Council in October 2004, 10 months after the earthquake. Subsequently, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, with support from UNDP, published the results of the consultative process and the Bam Housing Typology.

Sources: Victoria Kianpour, UNDP Iran, 2009, personal communication; and World Bank, “Planning for Urban and Township Settlements after the Earthquake,” http://siteresources.worldbank.org/CHINAEXTN/Resources/318949-1217387111415/Urban_planing_en.pdf.

Abarquez, Imelda, and Zubair Murshed. 2004. Community-Based Disaster Risk Management: Field Practitioners’ Handbook. Bangkok: ADPC, UNESCAP, and DIPECHO.

Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action (ALNAP). 2003. Participation by Crisis-Affected Populations in Humanitarian Action: A Handbook for Practitioners. London: Overseas Development Institute. http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/lib.nsf/db900SID/LHON-5TNH95?OpenDocument.  

Davidson, C. H. et al. 2006. “Truths and Myths about Community Participation in Post-Disaster Housing Projects.” Habitat International. Volume 31, Issue 1, March 2007, pp. 100–115. http://www.cbr.tulane.edu/PDFs/davidsonetal2006.pdf.  

Dercon, Bruno, and Marco Kusumawijaya. 2007. “Two Years of Settlement Recovery in Aceh and Nias. What Should the Planners have Learned?” (Paper for 43rd International Society of City and Regional Planners Congress). http://www.isocarp.net/Data/case_studies/952.pdf.

Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. 2006. The UNHCR Tool for Participatory Assessment in Operations. Geneva: United Nations. http://www.unhcr.org/publ/ PUBL/450e963f2.html.  

UN-HABITAT, Government of Indonesia, Provincial Government of Aceh, and the United Nations Development Programme. 2009. “Post-Tsunami Aceh-Nias Settlement and Housing Recovery Review.”

UN-HABITAT. 2007. People’s Process in Aceh and Nias (Indonesia), Manuals and Training Guidelines (in English and Bahasa). http://www.unhabitat-indonesia.org/publication/index.htm#film.

UN-HABITAT, Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific. n.d.. “Community Contracts.” http://www.fukuoka.unhabitat.org/event/docs/EVN_081216172311.pdf.

World Bank. 1996. Participation Sourcebook. Washington, DC: The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank). http://www.worldbank.org/wbi/sourcebook/sbhome.htm.  

 How to Do It

However, this reconstruction model entails establishing a community facilitation system.  The facilitation system depends on the recruitment, training, and deployment of community facilitators. Finding enough quality facilitators and getting them into affected communities quickly allows reconstruction to be scaled up and gives people certainty about how reconstruction will proceed and what their role in reconstruction will be. This certainty is considered to be an important factor in the satisfaction of the population with the program.

This section describes the approach to the use of community facilitators in the Community-Based Settlement Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Project funded by the Java Reconstruction Fund in Yogyakarta/Central Java reconstruction from 2005–2007, as well as previously in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami reconstruction in Aceh. While the participatory methodologies were similar for all reconstruction, in this program, each community also received a pool of funds to help finance infrastructure improvements that contributed to risk reduction in the community. More than 15,000 housing units were financed by this program in Yogyakarta and Central Java.

However, the community-based reconstruction model used in Yogyakarta is not without its challenges. Some of the principal challenges that must be overcome to make this model work well are following:

1. Finding the right people to be facilitators
2. Thinking big. that is, scaling up the process quickly enough, so that communities have certainty within a short time about what is going to happen
3. Preventing facilitators from being hired away by other agencies once they are trained
4. Bureaucratic bottlenecks that slow down disbursements to communities and payment of facilitator salaries and operating costs
   

The Bank is working to document and systematize its experience with this model. Even without completion of this documentation, a community-based model for reconstruction has become the official reconstruction model of the Indonesian government, and is expected to be applied—with some minor improvements, based on the Aceh and Yogyakarta experiences—in the reconstruction following the 2009 Padang earthquake. One measure that has been suggested to make the model even more effective is the training of a nationwide cadre of facilitators who could be quickly mobilized, thus reducing the need to conduct the recruitment and training on short notice following a disaster.

Source: World Bank Indonesia team, 2009, personal communication.

Annex 2. Developing a Community Participation Profile

1. Is there is a viable community structure in place that can establish priorities and respond to the most needy and vulnerable?
2. Will the community need help to manage its finances and provide oversight over community resources?
3. Are systems in place to ensure transparency and accountability at the community level?
4. What resources and skills are available in the community to contribute to reconstruction or other aspects of recovery (skilled and unskilled labor, building materials, land, and wealth)?
5. What are the attitudes toward and demand for participation in the reconstruction process?
6. What training will be required for the community to be successful in carrying out its responsibilities?

Not surprisingly, consultation with and involvement of a community are the best approaches for gathering the information needed to develop a CPP. The entire community does not need to participate; however, those who do should be relatively representative of the affected community that may participate in reconstruction.

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