Evaluating Effective Public Participation in Disaster Management and Climate Change Adaptation: Insights From Northern Ghana Through a User-Based Approach

Abstract

Public participation in disaster risk management and climate change adaptation program is acknowledged by researchers and practitioners, yet its actualization largely remains a dream. In principle, there have been several claims in favor of adopting community participation, albeit these remain anecdotal without empirical substance. The few apparent success stories are seldom scaled up or replicated, compelling most enthusiastic practitioners and planners become skeptical about the use of public participation concept in disaster management strategies. This calls for a comprehensive and systematic evaluation of participatory approaches to guide practitioners in their quest for meaningful local community participation in disaster risk management. Based on our case study in disaster prone villages in Northern Ghana, our research contributes to these emerging literature on risks by examining the process and outcome-based factors that ensure effective public participation. The inimitability of our study does not only lie in its pioneering attempt to systematically identify effective public participation factors for climate change, but unlike other participatory approaches where success is defined by the researchers and policy makers, ours relies on local community themselves to define the desired processes for and outcomes of effective public participation.