Understanding Risks and Building Enhanced Capabilities in Latin American Cities: Work Package 2 Interview Transcripts, Brazil and Colombia, 2022

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UKRI GCRF project URBE Latam's Work Package 2 aimed to identify windows of opportunity to institutionalise citizen-generated data for disaster risk governance in the case study countries Brazil and Colombia. The interview partners were selected from the project teams' existing contacts at the national (Colombia, Brazil), subnational (Rio de Janeiro state, Antioquia department) and municipal (Niterói, Medellín) levels and included representatives from disaster risk agencies, planning and statistics offices. The interviews were conducted in Brazilian Portuguese with the Brazilian stakeholders and in Spanish with the Colombian stakeholders. The interviews aimed to understand the extent to which disaster risk reduction governance processes are equitable. The semi-structured interview schedule started with conceptual definitions, such as questions regarding the interview partners' understandings of "resilience", "risk", "vulnerability", followed by questions regarding the indicators and data to measure these and any related concepts, including the roles of the various data actors, such as questions relating to usage, representativeness, and data quality. In response to the questions, interview partners suggested the following: - while "resilience" is an important concept, it is not used in disaster risk management and generally understood as communities' experiences of and responses to a disaster; - the legal framework establishes hierarchical relations in risk governance, data sharing across the governance scale and policy happens primarily at the response stage of the disaster risk cycle. - and that work with communities for prevention is the primary responsibility of municipal "social" teams.

URBE Latam addresses the implementation gap between sustainable development and equitable resilience. It will do so by using a transdisciplinary research approach aimed at empowering residents of disaster-prone urban poor neighbourhoods, which will underpin the co-production of enhanced, context-specific understandings of local risks and the integration of the resulting data into decision-making procedures in disaster risk reduction and sustainable development monitoring. The project is conducted by a highly skilled multi-disciplinary research team (including social sciences, engineering and physical sciences) and adopts a dialogic co-production approach to citizen-generated data which relies upon well-established partnerships with community-based initiatives for local development, education and disaster risk reduction in Rio de Janeiro and Medellin, as well as with governmental agencies involved in disaster risk reduction and local planning and development. URBE Latam proceeds in four integrated components that seek an enhanced understanding of risks, vulnerabilities and local capabilities in disaster-prone urban areas: first it is centred on the engagement of citizens to generate data to expand understandings of risks at the neighbourhood level; second, citizens engagement in risk will be pursued alongside an analysis of socio-spatial inequalities in resilience and development indicators and policies at city and national level; third, this will lead to the recalibration of environmental risk mapping with citizen-generated data; fourth, these components are articulated and integrated within a framework to facilitate dialogic transformations across the different levels and stakeholders involved. The process of advancing these outputs will further enable capacity development in local communities and the governments of Rio de Janeiro and Medellin; a process which will be augmented by improving the awareness of stakeholders in other Latin American cities and countries through broader dissemination. Insights from collaboratively produced citizen-generated data will be integrated into the practices of disaster risk management and development monitoring (e.g. SDG reporting) in collaboration with international policymaking agencies, thus enabling transformations towards more equitable disaster risk reduction and sustainable development. As an overarching outcome, the project will enable the transformation of practices, improve knowledge among a diverse range of stakeholders and enhance capacity to promote equitable resilience.