The politics of participation in community-based early warning systems: Building resilience or precarity through local roles in disseminating disaster information?

This paper challenges the implicit assumptions and material effects of community-based early warning systems (CBEWS) that mobilize resilience as their objective. Informed by five months of fieldwork in communities enrolled in a CBEWS initiated by the development organization Practical Action (PA) in Nepal's lower Karnali River Basin, I examine the inherent risks that accompany the participatory logic of even the best-intentioned interventions framed in terms of resilience. These risks include the ways in which assumptions inherent in the logic of resilience, when applied in concrete projects like CBEWS, can have the effect of unintentionally naturalizing vulnerability and individualizing responsibility for self-securitization in the name of empowerment. In the process, they may provide an excuse for a government's neglect of its marginalized citizens. This can occur if participatory interventions overlook structural dimensions of vulnerability and do not balance the demands they make of communities with efforts to hold governments accountable for protecting their vulnerable citizens. PA's CBEWS is a particularly informative case through which to examine these issues because, in addition to having unintended side effects representative of similar initiatives to build community resilience to disasters, PA is also working proactively through partnerships with the Government of Nepal to involve the state in solutions. For this reason, PA's CBEWS can both highlight concerns about the unintended effects that any DRR project framed in terms of resilience can have on communities and provide a model for how similar organizations navigating difficult political terrain can work with governments to give them greater responsibility.