Characterising Local Knowledge across the Flood Risk Management Cycle: A Case Study of Southern Malawi

Abstract

People possess a creative set of strategies based on their local knowledge (LK) that allow them to stay in flood-prone areas. Stakeholders involved with local level flood risk management (FRM) often overlook and underutilise this LK. There is thus an increasing need for its identification, documentation and assessment. Based on qualitative research, this paper critically explores the notion of LK in Malawi. Data was collected through 15 focus group discussions, 36 interviews and field observation, and analysed using thematic analysis. Findings indicate that local communities have a complex knowledge system that cuts across different stages of the FRM cycle and forms a component of community resilience. LK is not homogenous within a community, and is highly dependent on the social and political contexts. Access to LK is not equally available to everyone, conditioned by the access to resources and underlying causes of vulnerability that are outside communities’ influence. There are also limits to LK; it is impacted by exogenous processes (e.g., environmental degradation, climate change) that are changing the nature of flooding at local levels, rendering LK, which is based on historical observations, less relevant. It is dynamic and informally triangulated with scientific knowledge brought about by development partners. This paper offers valuable insights for FRM stakeholders as to how to consider LK in their approaches.

Community Based Flood Risk Management: Local Knowledge and Actor’s Involvement Approach from Lower Karnali River Basin of Nepal

“…Furthermore, the result revealed that the existing top-down system in Nepal requires improvement, particularly in the sense of coordination, communication, participation, transparency, accountability, and distribution of roles and responsibilities for line government bodies towards proactive action. These problems have been seen in most of the developing countries, such as India, Vietnam, and Bangladesh (Trogrlić et al, 2019). To address that, (Shaw, 2012a) highlighted if CB-FRM activities work progressive action-participation approach through the concept of "practice to the policy", it leads towards resilience, which is also emphasized in the current study.…”

“…Thus, the role of local communities and their engagement had been ignored to some extent. Since 90's, the concept of community-based disaster risk management (CB-DRM) has been globally accepted by communities as it most likely follows the people-centric (bottom-up) approach among the developing nations (Trogrlić et al, 2019;Tanwattana, 2018).…”

Invited perspectives: Building sustainable and resilient communities – recommended actions for natural hazard scientists

“…Reforms to the training of natural hazard scientists should be complemented by the adoption of different approaches to determining research questions, building research partnerships, and connecting research to decision makers. Effective partnerships, with clear roles and responsibilities, are important (Sargeant et al, 2018), and these will increasingly include a wider variety of skills and disciplines (e.g. ethnographers, behavioural scientists).…”

“Listening to the Sounds of the Water”: Bringing Together Local Knowledge and Biophysical Data to Understand Climate-Related Hazard Dynamics

“…In the past, local knowledge about hydrological and weather-related hazards has rarely been considered or integrated into DRR planning, as it has often been considered as inaccurate, unverifiable, or unavailable in a format easily synthesized or integrated with other information and knowledge. Over the last two decades, researchers have recognized multiple benefits of local knowledge for DRR, such as improved planning and implementation, targeted consideration of local needs, increased consideration of embedding gender concerns, augmented acceptance and ownership of DRR projects, and improved project effectiveness (Dekens 2007;Acharya and Prakash 2019;Š akić Trogrlić et al 2019). Despite growing recognition that local knowledge can be a richly detailed data source, and multi-method approaches can be harnessed to integrate diverse forms of knowledge, prioritization of local knowledge is not yet strongly reflected in the implementation of international disaster risk reduction frameworks (Tozier de la Poterie and Baudoin 2015).…”