Addressing community participation barriers using emic-etic perspectives

Abstract

Post-Disaster reconstruction projects often face many challenges, due to inadequacies of community participation. While active community participation directly influences project outcome, factors that restrict or facilitate their involvement are yet to be addressed. Using emic-etic perspectives from two case studies, this paper identifies the factors that act as barriers to community participation. The findings disclosed that it is not only non-community stakeholders who instil barriers to limit community participation – termed as external barriers – but the communities themselves also play a role in restricting their own involvement – termed as internal barriers. The study identified 21 participation barriers and classified them into four external barriers categories – behavioural, regulatory, communication, and integrity – and two internal barriers categories – socio-cultural, and capacity. The articulation of these barriers will help decision-makers address community participation issues and will enable them to achieve reconstruction objectives.