Community-Led Research (CLR) requires processes that support community participation, community prioritising, community decision-making and community action. This chapter sets out to explore the how of CLR, or more correctly one key element of the how. The particular context for this exploration is community-led disaster resilience building in three communities in New South Wales. The challenging interface in this work between the command-and-control structures of emergency management agencies and more informal community-led processes demonstrates very clearly how community-led processes might be supported and hindered.

In particular, we are interested here in how place and space enable or constrain participation, prioritising, decision-making and action in CLR. Key to this interest is an awareness of the importance of disaster preparedness, not only in terms of reducing the impact of the disaster but also in terms of perceived community self-efficacy. We draw on our collective experiences of engaging collaboratively with communities to build knowledge for social change, something done through research but also sometimes through community development projects. It is our experience that many of the principles and practices of community development add value to CLR and vice versa. These two fields of practice have the common difficulty of defining ‘community’, being comfortable with messiness, and requiring long time frames and uncertainty in terms of ‘outcomes’. Clarity about values, purpose and processes is foundational for both CLR and community development. What makes this work so challenging but also exciting is how values, purpose and processes are constantly interacting, requiring refining and renegotiating.

Disaster planning cycles of preparedness, response and recovery impact on whole communities, as well as having uneven impacts on particular groups and localities. Recent changes in government-led disaster planning in Australia support a shift from reliance on emergency management agencies as leaders and drivers to one of shared responsibility where communities are encouraged to become more self-reliant, working as partners with emergency services (Handmer & McLennan, 2014). Navigating the practicalities of this shift alongside community-led disaster planning reveals the ways in which changing relationships of power and participation between community members and agencies can be more effectively encouraged. This shift also mirrors some of the changes required for research and researchers interested in transitioning from experts to supporters in order to engage with CLR.

It is our experience that often research power relationships are an impediment to building trust and the co-production of new knowledge. Like Pigza (2016), we see community-based research as ‘human work that requires time, transparency, authenticity, trust, accountability, and clear communication’ (Pigza, 2016, p. 96). Research questions emerge from dialogue and listening, rather than being imposed from outside the community. Community members involved in any research need to have their agency recognised and be able to shape any decisions which are made. Making sure there is a diversity of voices and participation in any research is critical. An ethical responsibility in CLR is that the research itself builds capacity and contributes to the community.

Knowledge building has traditionally sat within university walls. This creates an academic form of knowledge which may not be informed by community practice. A common understanding of universities sees them as ‘repositories of sacred knowledge’, ‘transmitters’ of knowledge and ‘devoted to discovery’ (Moxley, 2003, p. 104). The culture of academia is often elitist, embedding ‘expertise’ within institutions of higher education (Pigza, 2016). This impacts not only on how individual academics undertake their research but also how the broader community views knowledge building (Powell, 2014). For many, particularly those with fewer resources and opportunities, this can result in an affirmation of academia’s claim of ownership of knowledge building. Community-based research is a marked departure from university-initiated research endeavours. For example, the University of Sydney’s Strategic Vision included ‘a mission to pursue the discovery and dissemination of new knowledge and understanding, attuned to the aspirations of society’ (2016, p. 19). This conceptualisation of knowledge building is university-centric, failing to acknowledge or capitalise on the co-production of knowledge. The university hopes to achieve this through investing in research strengths, attracting the best students and, somewhat as an aside, ‘expand and develop new partnerships, both locally and globally, that enable our research to make a difference’ (University of Sydney, 2016, p. 19). As has been argued previously, this sense in which working beyond the university is not central to knowledge building is not unique to the University of Sydney but common across the academic sector (Carman, 2013; Moxley, 2004; Robinson, 2014).

Growing alternative research approaches which intentionally shift knowledge building, ownership and action is slow, iterative and non-linear. Recalibrating the relationship between communities and traditional knowledge holders such as universities requires patience and goodwill on all sides. The adoption of a community-based research framework (Caine & Mill, 2016; Frankel Merenstein, 2015) to build knowledge with residents and others evolves over time. It is supported practically by a range of participatory research methodologies including action research. Like other participatory forms of research (see Stoecker, 2003 for example), community-based research seeks to ‘develop practical knowledge that is relevant to the community’ (Caine & Mill, 2016, p. 19). Our research activities are grounded in the ‘day-to-day experiences of residents and engaged with issues of personal, communal and structural power’ (Caine & Mill, 2016, p. 14). Questions arise from the community and reflect issues of importance to the community (Frankel Merenstien, 2015). Through CLR projects knowledge is built about the impact of social policies and programs within a social justice framework that emphasises resident participation in decision-making, community capacity, social inclusion and collaborative action (Vinson & Rawsthorne, 2013; Gilchrist & Taylor, 2011; Rawsthorne & Howard, 2011).

We see CLR as methodologically agnostic, in that it is not predetermined in outcome or approach but driven more by the context and goals of the people we are working with. In the project discussed here, the scope of the data collected supports ‘research rigour through triangulation and extended reflection’ (Stake, 2003, p. 150). A key focus of this data collection was to ‘seek out emic meanings held by the people within the case’ (Stake, 2003, p. 144); that is, to explore how individuals interpreted and made sense of their experiences. This agnostic methodological approach is demanding for us as researchers as we need to be able to be competent and flexible across a range of data collection approaches. A community may wish to unpack existing quantitative data (such as the census) or use narrative story telling or arts-informed methodologies to build knowledge about their community. This is unlike more traditional research design approaches where the researcher’s skills set, to some extent, shapes the data collection process (think here how often people describe themselves as a ‘qualitative’ researcher or ‘quantitative’ researcher or ‘mixed methods’ researcher). In this way, community-based research can be daunting for the novice researcher. It can also create the opportunity for collaboration among researchers with different skills or preferences, overcoming the need for any one researcher to be the ‘jill of all methods’.

As people involved in the creation of knowledge, academics are often viewed as the ‘experts’ in research theory and methodologies. CLR, of course, disrupts this understanding, with expertise understood as sitting in different places and in different forms. Accessing this knowledge or expertise though is likely to be affected by both place and space. Plainly, community members will feel more able to contribute their knowledge in particular settings and at particular times. To illustrate this, we will draw on recent experiences in CLR with communities preparing for disaster.

​Supporting community-led disaster resilience

Since 2018 we have been working in partnership with government, non-government organisations, philanthropic organisations and three communities in New South Wales building community capacities in disaster planning. Integrated with this was an action research process which ran concurrently with activities in each community. An important starting point was that the three communities expressed interest in the project – participation was not top down or imposed from outside, which is too often the experience of communities. The three communities were in very different contexts: peri-urban (this community was located on the outer edges of a major capital city with both rural and expanding urban development); coastal (this community was suburban with a stable population but located in a large tourist region); and remote locations (the last community was a small rural/remote town). The disaster challenges they face are also diverse, including drought, flood, storm and fire. The community-led disaster planning project aimed to support the communities to identify, trial and evaluate locally driven strategies. A participatory action research design was developed for the project which incorporated six action research cycles. The research design included mapping and documenting, learning from each community, supporting knowledge sharing between communities and providing research support for co-designed local disaster-resilience-building initiatives. The research and research team have been clearly located in the project as a resource and support rather than a leader.

In each of the communities, a similar approach was taken to engage with local people and develop ideas for community-led disaster planning, but we found very early that the impacts and follow-on from this process took very different directions in each community. Although the topic of each conversation was focused on all hazards disaster resilience (all natural disasters) and the starting point for this conversation was the same, very localised contexts and priorities quickly became the central drivers of community engagement and leadership. For example, in one community, the growing impact of the drought was infused through every local interaction, while in another, the aftermath of a large and devastating cyclone served to amplify existing tensions and gaps in relationships between formal and informal local networks. In each of these cases, planning and action were driven in very different ways by both the places in which community-led planning was emerging, and the spaces in which community members and agencies were able to interact. Historical relationships and narratives of resilience and community connection were quite different in each community, as were existing connections with local emergency services and local government. These factors coalesced throughout the project around the places and spaces available for participation and community decision-making.

Both of these concepts were central to the ways in which community participation, community prioritising, community decision-making and community action developed.

​Place

Conceptually, ‘place’ is having its day in the sun! Place-based planning, place-based interventions, place-based policy to name just a few. Our use of ‘place’ here has some similarities with these examples, but we are also drawing on the sociological understanding of belonging through and in place (Bennett, 2015). In the community development literature, ‘places gain meaning through social interactions and are far more than simply geographic locations’ (Plunkett et al., 2018, p. 473). Plunkett and colleagues argue that ‘a place is created when people assign meaning to previously undistinguished spaces’ (2018, p. 473). On a similar line, Bennett argues ‘belonging as a way of being-in-the-world is less tangible but becomes tangible through relationships with place, things and other people, that create it and result from it’ (2015, p. 956, emphasis added). Community life (at the nexus of the social and the physical environment) is given its shape through the ‘habitual use of a place by the people who inhabit it’ (Bennett, 2015, p. 956).

Place shapes how community members engage with community-led processes, be these development or research oriented. As our title suggests, CLR requires ‘way more than a town hall meeting’. In the three communities, we repeatedly noted the impact of place on who was in the room, whose voice was valued and who was absent. The usual places for formal community gatherings – town halls, community centres, etc. – attracted people already networked into these formal places. These ‘tried and true’ places limited community participation to the ‘tried and true’ performance. Community members will belong to or be excluded from these places – ‘through an attachment to place created over time, intersubjective relationships to others in the place and inalienable relationships to the materiality of the place’ (Bennett, 2015, p. 956). For knowledge building, this formality of place created a focus on ‘representative samples’ and ‘surveys’. Such an approach, in our experience, has limited transformational possibilities. Community needs may be documented (often thoroughly) through this process, but reports are then left on shelves to gather dust. In this performance, research is seen as an end in itself – there is little understanding or engagement with research as being a (contested) knowledge claim. The power of ‘place’ in Community-led processes was evident when conversations were held in informal or unusual places.

The irony of inclusion is that many of our formal processes aimed at inclusion are experienced as very exclusionary. A public meeting in which ‘all are welcome’ advertised through local media, held at the town hall on a Thursday evening, might on the surface appear inclusive but in fact creates multiple barriers to participation. These formal meetings were dominated by people representing agencies or particular interests. In one community, Aboriginal community members only became involved when conversations shifted away from these formal processes. Meeting in places familiar and safe to the Aboriginal community saw greater participation, transforming the project away from service-system and information-heavy responses. In this community, a number of smaller conversations exploring possibilities and connections between knowledge of Country,1 community relationships and the importance and value of culture in disaster-resilience building led to participation in a broader conversation. Similar listening and connecting conversations were held at the local pub, annual show and local shops before a wider community meeting was experienced as valuable and inclusive. Through informal conversations, innovations and creative collaborations emerged that were unique to the context.

In other communities, local businesses such as cafes and pubs emerged as places in which very constructive community conversations could occur. These are natural bump zones where community members mix across differences that might otherwise divide them. The community places people use in everyday life have been the places where community-led ideas have been incubated into projects and initiatives ready to be shared with the wider community before further refinement and adaption. In all three communities (although in different ways) where community members were able to shift the conversation from a more compartmentalised and service-driven frame – for example, information provision for disaster responses – to one which included all aspects of community life in particular places, community members joined and stayed with the emerging projects.

In the communities, understandings of and relationships to place included social, cultural, economic and environmental aspects. Community-led decision-making integrated these aspects throughout deliberations and in action. In one community, it was only after key community members came to understand that the focus of the project was much broader than flooding that other community members came on board, and more inclusive ideas for long-term, and community-wide, resilience-building came together. Often research projects prioritise reducing the scope and focus for manageability. In CLR, one learning from this project is that processes which recognise the intersections of community life rather than compartmentalising these provide a better fit with community experiences and perceptions.

In the particular communities involved in this project, place was experienced as all aspects of where I live and where I belong. CLR had limited success until community members were able to shape resilience-building projects that reflected this understanding of community life. This took time and also a process of making space for genuine community participation, deliberation and decision-making. We now turn to this element of space in our exploration of the how of CLR. Layered with place, the ways in which spaces are constructed, opened up and maintained resulted in very different levels of community participation and sustained engagement in the community sites.

The concept of space, in a community development context, is both a physical and an abstract one. It is physical in its relationship to place – how, if at all, does the physical environment invite or hinder participation? There is an intimate connection between place and space. The concepts of power and place are linked in that the choice of venue, time and the general parameters of a collective gathering inherently privilege some participants over others. This power is the more abstract element of space. How space is used, filled (or not) in a physical sense will influence space in a relational sense. As space can be created for participation, it can also be used (often unconsciously) to exclude participation. This understanding of how to use space is a nuanced skill and requires facilitators and researchers to be highly emotionally aware of people, power and social inclusion (and exclusion). It requires knowledge of these dynamics and a skill and preparedness to create space and safety for lesser-heard voices. This seems like a clear and well-known process in community engagement and development; however, we found in this project that knowledge and practice were often more challenging to integrate. Two quotes below illustrate the ways in which community members navigated and made sense of the means by which space could be used to challenge and include:

In the first quote, the community member notes the value and importance of making space for community members to be involved; and in the second, the importance of advocacy and valuing alternative views is articulated. In both quotes, we see spaces made and utilised actively by community members and these voices are central to CLR.

In the community-led disaster planning research we observed the complexity of valuing contributions from highly engaged and active community members (the people eager to be at the town hall meeting), whilst also endeavouring to hear the quieter (or absent) voices. This was keenly highlighted in one particular community, where initial workshop participants came from a neighbouring and well-connected community. Community members from this community were small in number and initially the louder voices from the neighbouring area focused discussion on their community. Space was unintentionally shut down for the small number of local voices in the community. Space for community voices were excluded further from the project discussion when the low attendance of these residents was attributed to there being no community in the local area. Central to this closing down of space was the community engagement facilitator’s understanding of community itself. Low attendance at the workshop or town hall meeting of local people was explained as a community problem rather than a problem for the community engagement process. Space for community participation and deliberation was refocused into a neighbouring community with the local community excluded because they did not attend the town hall meeting. This assumption that in order to participate interested communities will attend the space which is set up by those outside the community, is one that workers and researchers should be aware of as it imposes a top-down planning process.

Shevellar and Westoby (2018) outline key principles normative to community development relevant to this discussion of space. Two of these principles are of direct relevance to this discussion in that they underpin the ideology of Community-Led disaster preparedness and research. First, the concept of social justice ‘working towards betterment, emancipation and empowerment, equity, social justice, self-determination and the re-allocation of resources to the greatest social benefit’ (Shevellar & Westoby, 2018, p. 5). The second principle of note is valuing local knowledge and resources. How inclusive and exclusive spaces were opened up and shut down in this process directly impacted the way these principles could be enacted. Spaces are a central shaper in terms of who has voice and power. Here, deliberation space is cordoned off for those who follow the processes set up and run by those outside the community. Community members who did not follow expectations (to attend the meeting) were unintentionally made invisible. They did not attend so they did not exist.

Later in the project, re-engagement with the focus community using the strategies described above – cafe meetings, spending time at the local farmers’ market, connecting with community members in everyday life – resulted in a very different group of people meeting together at the local pub to explore and develop ideas that were priorities for them. This group comprised only residents of the community. When the discussion re-centred around that community, local people joined the planning process. In part this can also be attributed to the framing of the issue, namely the scope and magnitude of disasters and their impact on people. How questions are asked is vitally important.

The concept of the ‘wicked problem’ (Bishop & Dzidic, 2014) (describing complex problems, seemingly intractable and unresolvable) bears consideration in this project because ‘both the problems and solutions are confounding, with outcomes often ambiguous’ (Shevellar & Westoby, 2018 p. 4). One of the tensions created throughout this project was the ‘push/pull’ between exploration of the issues and a propensity to try to ‘solve’ the community needs. Again, when this is done by outside workers not part of a community, ownership and self-determination are placed at risk. Space for community connection, deliberation and decision-making are constrained.

From the perspective of community members, space for community deliberation, exploration of issues and ideas and decision-making was further shut down when discussions were funding-led. In one community, time and space was made for community members to talk, connect and slowly develop ideas and initiatives which they could start with already existing resources. Only after this, they began to explore project expansion and the possibility of funding. In the community described above, community-led planning workshops led with the promise of funding and this both skewed and constrained spaces for considered discussion and resulted in a longer process of community engagement.

As part of some snapshot data collection in the project, the research team conducted phone interviews with a sample of participants from this particular community who had been invited to be involved in the community-led disaster planning project.

Through the course of these interviews, it became apparent community members and organisation staff held differing motivations for being involved in the project, which also bore a relationship to their ongoing involvement. For those who attended the initial workshop in the coastal community, including representatives from the neighbouring community, the promise of funding was seen as a major motivator. In addition, it became clear at meetings that different members of the community held differing views as to the most effective use of any funds. This created a competitive rather than a deliberative dynamic in meetings, which constrained space for a slower and more inclusive conversation. People came to the workshop with a ready-made project and in order to seek funds. Local community members were, as a result, crowded out by established groups and organisations outside the community. What is of interest in facilitating community-led projects is the tendency for funds to take over the conversation and to be seen as the panacea for all ills. The unintended consequence of this is disempowerment for participants, as the focus shifts from community strengths and ideas to external solutions, pre-designed projects and organisationally oriented goals.

This dovetailed into clarity of purpose for the project. In particular, there was confusion as to the role of the project staff and that of the research team (and action research). This is worthy of consideration for future projects undertaken with this approach as the ‘faces’ (for community members) largely became merged and the people remembered were the most recent people to have been present. Purpose was also enmeshed in the discussion above about the goals of the project.

A final learning from the research about the importance of space relates to diversity and participation. Those who attended the first workshop (the town hall meeting) from the community felt disenfranchised and that their goals had not been met. A community-led planning process here might take time to engage with a broader group in the community and support the small group who attended to collaborate in this process. The workshop or town hall meeting process both heightened the space for this group to be the sole community representatives but simultaneously shut down spaces for their voice to be effectively heard and for this group to work on a broader engagement plan. Their voice was marginalised unintentionally because they were seen as both not representative of the whole community (due to small numbers) and as a symbol that the community did not exist in this particular place. Only later in the project was the space for a more inclusive conversation with this group and other local community members opened up.

For others who had either chosen not to be involved in the project or who had withdrawn after the first meeting there was a sense of not having had a voice. It is an issue worthy of reflection in relation to how the creation of space and the use of place might have influenced this belief and how space and place could be used differently in future.

The ways in which the contours of space in this particular community changed the dynamics of community participation and opportunities for community members to work together on local initiatives were significant.

Observation of the use of both place and space in this project has provided us with an opportunity to reflect on the values which underpin community-led work and research. The term itself (community) holds different meanings for different people. It is not always clear if community is an inherent concept or something we create, and whether it is prescribed by ourselves or with others (Meade, Shaw & Banks, 2016). Politically, ‘community’ contains notions of democracy, reciprocity and self-determination but it can also enhance (or create) difference and exclusion (Bauman, 2001). Inherent in the concept of community-led work is a conscious deconstruction of traditional paradigms of working with people that can both assume and reinforce or create traditional power paradigms. Traditional models of community development and research have assumed knowledge is held with the ‘expert’ (be it the worker or the researcher). Inverting this assumption and working from an egalitarian premise provides rich experiences but brings its own ethical challenges.

One of these ethical challenges arose in the conduct of this project and it relates to the underpinning (and differing) value sets of the key stakeholders. Looking around the town hall at community meetings, it became clear the issues mentioned of space and place arose from different expectations and values.

Emergency services have long held the mantle of responsibility and authority in the disaster space. With responsibility and authority comes power, whether this is a known power or (even) a wanted power. Changing the relationships between emergency services and communities is a slow and uneven process. Like researchers, emergency services are caught between the imperative to take charge, the expectations of communities that they will, and the understanding that this position is unsustainable and disempowering for communities. Interestingly, in the communities where clear boundaries and parameters for negotiation between community members and agencies have been established early, opportunities have been created for emergency services to adopt a supportive rather than leading role. This shows promise as a practice for realigning relationships of power and expertise and establishing sustainable community-led planning. The two quotes below provide some examples of this thinking and the ways in which goodwill was enacted to build collaboration:

In this project, key learning about CLR, in a similar way, has highlighted the importance of researchers supporting rather than leading community knowledge building. We have seen most success where communities have sought their own space in this first instance, to think, listen, plan and design. This space has not been free of tension, but deliberations, negotiations and consensus building have been more successful when community members have been able to open up and maintain that space, inviting agencies and researchers in when needed as supporters and collaborators. Place is defined by community members and space is created to talk through and act on all aspects of community life, of which resilience-building for disasters is just one element.

​References