CARISMAND

Programme: H2020-DRS-21-2014: Ethical/Societal Dimension Topic 2: Better understanding the links between culture, risk perception and disaster management

Instrument: CSA

Total Project budget: €3.788.526,25

Duration: 36 months (01 October 2015 – 30 September 2018)

Full project title: CARISMAND - Culture And RISkmanagement in Man-made And Natural Disasters

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RUG Responsibilities:

RUG is Overall Project Coordinator of the CARISMAND Project

Project Summary:

Specific challenge:

Culture is the characteristics of a particular group of people, defined by everything from a set of values, history, literature, language, religion to cuisine, social habits or music and arts. Preparedness, response to disasters and after-crisis recovery is always influenced by cultural background of individuals and the society they live in. To this end, cultural factors play also an important role in determining the way people respond to stress, engage in the crisis management and accept disaster relief in an emergency situation. At the same time lack of cultural understanding, sensitivity and competencies can hamper and even harm the professional response to disaster as it is crucial to understand the cultural background of disaster victims.

Objectives

1. To provide a broad multi-disciplinary overview of existing knowledge about the cultural factors that may shape and influence citizens’ risk perceptions, emotions, and risk behaviour in the context of man-made, natural and technical disasters, and establish a sound theoretical basis for improving disaster policies and procedures.
2. To provide a detailed gap analysis between current legal frameworks, policies, regulations and actual practices across different European countries regarding the inclusion of cultural aspects in the disaster management cycle, and identify best-practice examples and the structural potential to implement them in other locations.
3. To identify how disaster risk communication itself is embedded in culture – including the role of the media in risk communication – and which cultural factors within disaster management organisations influence the effectiveness of professional management and response.
4. To explore the possibilities and current practices of how cultural aspects can strengthen the ability of citizens and communities to prepare for disaster situations, respond efficiently and accelerate recovery processes, proposing recommendations for disaster managers on how cultural values can be used for citizen empowerment.
5. To analyse citizens’ uptake – or rejection – of different technologies in disaster preparation, response, and recovery, exploring how different technology acceptance cultures can contribute to both successful disaster management and enhancement of citizens’ coping strategies.
6. To develop over the project’s life-time an active feedback-loop between disaster management stakeholders and citizens that can be institutionalised. This will establish, test and refine solutions for culturally-informed best practices in disaster management and benefit from a wide cross-sectional knowledge transfer.
7. To develop a “formal” toolkit for disaster management stakeholders, as well as a knowledge base that is “mapping” culture in the context of disaster and can be used by disaster managers in their everyday practice as well as by interested citizens for awareness, information and empowerment purposes.

Expected Impact

• increased effectiveness of those who respond to disasters;
• a more resilient society by ensuring that cities are better prepared for and able to recover from emergencies.
• better meeting the needs of various cultures during disaster relief, thus improving reaction time and reducing fatalities;in order to provide disaster relief.
• providing a framework for improving disasters' policies and practices by taking into consideration every disaster victim's cultural and personal uniqueness.

Furthermore, CARISMAND will explore legal frameworks as well as actual actor categories, disaster management organisation, procedures, and policies and guidelines in place across Europe. The gap analysis, as well as the identification of best-practice examples, will provide the “scaffolding” for a matrix report which, additionally, will be discussed and refined in cyclical events (stakeholder assemblies) and benefit from extensive cross-sectional knowledge transfer between actors from different organisations, their own cultural backgrounds, and dealing with different types of disasters. Beyond the identification of “institutional” local procedures or systems that specifically target and benefit cultural groups, additional focus will be on innovative solutions of NGO’s and informal activities of communities that could be beneficially implemented elsewhere.

Ultimately, the development of a comprehensive framework for culturally informed policies and practices in disaster management will “formalise” the synthesised results of all work packages. However, particularly the practice of formal and informal disaster managers will require a “tool” that is easily accessible and adaptable to the needs of their everyday work. Therefore, a toolkit will be developed that, additionally, allows disaster managers to access a large web-based online knowledge base with an intuitive, user-friendly and dynamic frontend. Moreover, it will provide detailed information for citizens how they can explore their culture-specific personal and communal strengths and skills in disaster situations.

The action is expected to proactively target the needs and requirements of users, such as citizens, first responders, urban communities and local security agencies.

Website: www.carismand.eu

For further information please contact: Melania Tudorica (m.tudorica@step-rug.nl).