Citizen Engagement for Disaster Management Presentation-8

Benefits of Citizen Engagement The spectrum of citizen engagement includes Inform, Consult, Involve, Collaborate, and Empower (International Association of Public Participation). The potential benefits of citizen engagement are: Making Legitimate Decisions. Making Better Policy. Overcoming Polarization. Reducing Conflict. Looking for Common Ground. Building Competent, Responsible Citizens. Including Minorities.

Barriers to Citizen Engagement Barriers of Citizen Engagement: Legitimacy Physical access Stereotyping Transportation Ability Communication Gender.

Tools to facilitate good Discursive Participation Brain-storming Reverse brainstorming. Star-bursting focuses on generating questions rather than answers. Role-storming is the technique to help people overcome their inhibitions during group brainstorming sessions.

How to prepare Citizen Engagement Plan Ask yourself and your team following questions: What do we understand by community? What are the barriers in reaching out to them? What are the messages we want to communicate? What communication strategy can be useful? What are the networks and channel we think need to be created? How to sustain the dialogue?

How to prepare Citizen Engagement Plan In what way online tools be useful? What are the possibilities of using mobile telephony? What are the social and cultural occasions that can be used to share the messages? How to make it a two-way process? What can we do to have feedback analysis mechanism? Can the community wisdom be integrated with planning process?

Some Useful Tips Every Department has to find their own answers to these questions, but following ideas may be given an instant try: Develop some good audio-visual Conversation Modules on important areas for interaction with community. Develop some Documentaries on good practices/examples to be shown to the community. Develop some One-Act Plays or short Plays on critical issues and make arrangements for performances with the help of Civil Society Groups or Schools. Engage school/college students to take out processions to convey important messages on important days. Make use of important religious or cultural occasions to convey messages.

Some useful Tips Organise Household visits through volunteers/school college students/civil society groups to create awareness. Make arrangements for sending bulk messages on critical issues. Create a Website or Interactive Portal to transfer knowledge and get feedback from the community. Institutionalise a system of analysis of the feedback from the community and factoring it in the departmental plans.

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