Co-production of risk knowledge and improvement of risk communication: A three-legged stool

Despite decades of progress in disaster risk reduction, efforts to enhance risk awareness and influence behavioral change still seem to be falling short. When we reflect on our collective experience and envision the future of disaster risk reduction programs, we find promise in approaches that implicitly treat knowledge as not just something transmitted but as a relationship fostered with multiple publics. In this mode, the public is not simply a passive recipient of expert knowledge but a co-producer of risk knowledge. We argue that disaster risk reduction requires a reorientation based on a foundation built on three areas of research: (1) Indigenous and local knowledge, (2) social learning, and (3) narrative ways of knowing. We employ key ideas from these promising areas of research to formulate an integrative framework for the co-production of risk knowledge. Such an integrative framework can provide a powerful and useful vehicle for generating new practices around disaster risk reduction.