Advancing ethical and relational disaster risk reduction

Efforts to reduce disaster risk from climate change and natural hazards can be more impactful and ethical when intervention initiatives recognize how local perceptions of risk and nature are relational, place-based, and often different from contemporary scientific framings. Doing this, we argue, requires engaging with relational values, and particularly diverse perceptions of risk and nature. Relational thinking within disaster risk reduction interventions can take numerous forms to avoid common pitfalls of externally-designed programs oriented around scientific perspectives that too often fail to engage with the knowledge systems and values of local communities. These relational dimensions can be ontological (e.g., understanding diverse and plural realities), epistemic (e.g., what is worthy and legitimate knowledge), or methodological (e.g., ways of engaging). In this article, we outline how current concepts of risk and nature in mainstream science, policy, and practice discourses are singularly defined, primarily as instrumental and utilitarian. Furthermore, there is a risk that imposing external understandings of risk or nature can, while well-intentioned to support climate change adaptation, be suppressive of important local knowledge systems and reflective of colonial histories. This can undermine the efficacy and legitimacy of interventions that fail to adapt to local contexts, decreasing the likelihood of meaningful impact. To illustrate these dynamics, we provide empirical examples from coastal Indonesia of how relational thinking can inform ethical, just, and legitimate disaster risk reduction, and provide a framework with guidance for advancing relational disaster risk reduction practices and research based on recent literature.