Disasters, Decentralisation and Local Information: Factors Influencing Local Empirical Information Usage in Two Local Governments in the Philippines

Disaster risk management (DRM) is an overarching pursuit to ensure the resilience of society against the extreme effects of natural hazards. As a decentralised development endeavour, DRM places local governments at the helm of mitigating disaster risks and social vulnerabilities. With resource and capacity limitations, local governments are assigned the responsibility of alleviating the undesirable impacts of disasters. Thus, information of the underlying conditions of their respective localities is essential. Several local governments in the Philippines have ventured into using information from Community-based Monitoring Systems (CBMS) for DRM. However, the specific aspects of DRM in which local governments have made use of CBMS information remain unexplored. Also, there has not been an analysis of how different factors influence CBMS information usage for the said decentralised task. The neighbouring municipalities of Santa Elena and Labo serve as vantage points to explore which aspects of disaster risk management have local governments made use of CBMS information and what factors explain the usage (or non usage) of the said information for DRM. The study shows that both Santa Elena and Labo have made limited use of CBMS information for DRM. Among the main factors that influence CBMS information usage is how the respective models and praxis form managing disaster risks. Accordingly, these DRM models and praxes are influenced by a host of other factors, most notably how the local disaster risk managers conceptualise what ‘disaster risk management’ means. Other factors also interact and consequently determine whether and how CBMS information is utilised to manage local disaster risks.