Enhancing Community Resilience to Floods: A Theoretical Framework of Community Participation in Federal Voluntary Programs

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There has been a growing interest in using voluntary programs as a salient policy tool for mitigating the effects of various hazards, including those associated with flooding. Yet many federal voluntary programs are finding it hard to increase rates of participation and/or compliance. More broadly, there is no explicit and comprehensive theoretical framework to explain the reasons for such low rates among communities. Accordingly, this work will develop a novel theoretical framework of community participation in federal voluntary programs for the mitigation of flood-related risk by integrating key insights from multiple disciplines such as political science, public administration, environmental economics, nonprofit management and sociology. This research will support policy making in the design and implementation of targeted policies to encourage communities to participate in federal voluntary programs, and improve compliance in areas such as community resilience to floods, environmental protection and adaptation, and critical infrastructure protection.The scientific objective this work pursues is the development of a theory of participation in voluntary programs for flood risk mitigation, resulting in improved understanding of the factors that motivate communities to participate in federal voluntary programs in general. This study will address this objective in the context of the Community Rating System (CRS) through two guiding research questions: (1) What factors motivate communities to participate in the CRS program? (2) What are the differences between CRS participating communities and non-CRS participating communities with regard to flood risk management practices and contextual factors? The CRS, a Federal voluntary program designed to promote local flood resilience, is an appropriate testbed because only 5 percent of the over 22,000 eligible communities are participating in the CRS. Primary and secondary data sources will be used, including archival and interview data. Prior to conducting the interviews, the study will use Propensity Score Matching techniques to match 50 randomly selected CRS participating communities (treatment group) with 50 non-CRS participating communities (control group). The matching will be based on community-level characteristics such as population size, median housing values, and flood risk. The study's findings are expected to advance scientific understanding of the drivers of community participation in a host of federal voluntary programs.