Re-configuring Local Governance for Community Resilience: social learning for flood adaptation under a changing climate

This project aims to provide a more effective way for communities to become resilient in the face of changing risks associated with anthropogenic climate change. It will focus on the issue of flooding in a rural Devon community as a way of exploring the potential for using 'co-learning' between community members, academic researchers and local agencies to understand the flood risks associated with current climatic conditions and how those risks and associated vulnerabilities are shifting as a result of climate change. In so doing, the project will work towards a community flood resilience plan that will seek to represent the different types of knowledge demonstrated by the different constituencies.

The project has the following objectives:
1. To adopt a deliberative and collaborative approach for engaging a range of community participants in a dialogue for co-creating knowledge for understanding risks associated with fluvial and surface water flooding;
2. To use this social learning process as a way of promoting informal learning about public engagement for representatives of the local state, environmental agencies and climate researchers across the physical and social sciences;
3. To enable a collaborative and jointly agreed assessment of current levels of flood resilience between the research participants and to develop place-based strategies to flood risk management within the context of future impacts from anthropogenic climate change;
4. To consider the role this methodology can play in promoting community resilience at a time of local government service re-structuring.

The project will be developed in collaboration with two main partners. First, Devon County Council, as the co-ordinating local authority with responsibility for emergency planning, will provide knowledge, expertise and access to the community flood planning process for the selected case study community of Crediton. Second, in order to meet objective 2 of the project, the Climate Outreach Information Network (COIN) will participate to ensure that the wider policy and practitioner community can benefit from the learning gained by the project. The project will also include contributions from statutory agencies (Environment Ageny and Fire authority).

The project will use a competency group approach to build knowledge and confidence amongst the different stakeholders in the community for developing a flood resilience plan. Over the course of six months four group meetings will be held at intervals of two months at which there will be representatives from the community of Crediton, Devon County Council, the Environment Agency, Devon and Somerset Fire and Rescue Service and a small group of physical and social science academics. These meetings will explore current understandings of flood risk and associated vulnerabilities, the ways in which such vulnerabilities will change in the future and the most effective way of making the community resilient to future flood events.

The purpose of the competency group approach is to overcome many of the current barriers to effective community resilience, which is often framed by a top-down, government-led approach to policy making and implementation that can hide or distort vital local knowledges of risks and how to deal with them. The project therefore provides an opportunity to explore the potential for re-configuring risk governance that re-balances knowledge and decision-making between the local state and publics.

In this way, the project aims to explore the potential role of social learning about an environmental hazard to assess the role such a methodology could play in re-configuring relations between the local state, statutory agencies and communities. In so doing, the project has the potential to demonstrate the value of a deliberative and knowledge-based approach to tackling a range of changing vulnerabilities.

Impact summary:

The project aims to create three types of impact. First it will produce a community flood resilience plan through a negotiated process within a specific community, involving publics, local agencies and academic researchers. Second, the project will explore the viability of co-creation as a tool for generating forms of knowledge that are both accepted and form the basis for local decision making on controversial environmental issues. Third, the work will demonstrate how the involvement of climate researchers in the process of knowledge co-production can be used to re-frame the ways in which scientific knowledge is produced and communicated by including them in dialogues with policy makers and publcis about climate change knowledge, its validity and use.

Beneficiaries:

First, there will be a direct benefit to the case study community of Crediton in Devon, which does not currently have a community flood resilience plan and is designated as being a community where flooding is likely to become a serious problem. The plan will be a pragmatic instrument, designed to be recognised by all stakeholders in the community to enable them to prepare for and deal with a flood event, placing particular emphasis on how the community can become more resilient through existing networks. This will be placed within the context of anthropogenic climate change and the plan will offer the opportunity for the community to discuss and deliberate on how it will cope with higher frequencies of intense rainfall events and consequent flooding. As such, the co-production of a flood resilience plan seeks to impact upon the physical, social and economic environment by facilitating changes in public awareness and behaviour within the community and in so doing provide an improved framework for the management of flood risk.

Second, the project will benefit statutory agencies, including Devon County Council, the Environment Agency and Fire Authority. These agencies are the co-ordinating bodies for flood risk communication, disaster prevention and response. In a period of financial restraint, the governance of emergencies is undergoing review, with the outcome that agencies will need to re-configure their relationships with communities. The project will aim to explore how agencies can become enablers, rather than controllers, of preparation and response in time of community need. In so doing, the project aims to impact upon practitioners and professional services in the following ways:

1. To use the research process (co-production competency groups) and findings to stimulate and inform debate between practitioners within agencies and between practitioners and local stakeholders;

2. To stimulate debate among practitioners on the utility of 'conventional wisdom' on flood preparation and risk management within Crediton;

3. To assist in shaping policy development by statutory authorities through 1) the development of resources to enhance the effectiveness of professional practice and 2) providing evidence on the viability of existing approaches to flood risk management under anthropogenic climate change.

Third, the involvement of the Climate Outreach Information Network (COIN) will produce impact for academic researchers working in the field of climate change. In essence, COIN will facilitate a discussion within the academy on how climate scientists can have greater appreciation of the end use of their research by different constituencies. In so doing, this element of the project seeks to inform the behaviour and future practice of researchers and teachers by 1) providing experience of the potential challenges and opportunities for engagement of academic and non-academic partners, 2) generating a greater appreciation of different 'ways of knowing' between a diverse range of communities and 3) using such understanding to better understand opportunities for effective impact generation in collaborative projects.