The Art of Disaster Risk Reduction: an arts-based approach to strengthening community and institutional capacity in Colombia

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Summary This proposal focuses on unanticipated pathways to impact directly related to the AHRC co-funded interdisciplinary research project, Moving with Risk: forced displacement and vulnerability to hazards in Colombia (1 November 2016-31 October 2018). Moving with Risk piloted innovative arts-based methodologies to examine how people forced from their homes by conflict in Colombia are exposed to heightened risk from environmental hazards such as flooding, landslide and fire in the places where they resettle. The research team used creative arts as a methodological tool for data collection and a channel for empowerment of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in disaster risk reduction (DRR). The arts-based methodologies piloted in Moving with Risk proved highly effective in engaging and empowering IDPs and the institutions that work with them around DRR discussion, practice and policy. This project will work in new at-risk case study sites in the municipalities of Manizales, Pereira and Soacha, and connect with new communities, in order not only to enhance and develop the benefits and value of Moving with Risk, but also to transfer these to new audiences not accessed in the original research.Via close collaboration throughout the research process, the team has developed strong relationships of trust with IDPs, their communities and the organisations that work with them in DRR. This has generated new opportunities for impact that could not have been foreseen at the time of the original research proposal. IDPs and the institutions involved in the original project have fed directly into planning the proposed impact activities, which are intended both to develop and deepen existing relationships and also to generate similar relationships of trust with new communities in new neighbourhoods not included in the original research.The impact project will bring together university academics, researchers from Human Rights organisation Dejusticia, representatives of the Colombian Red Cross and DRR sections of local municipalities, to reach three new audiences. First, it will engage whole communities exposed to environmental risk, in new case study sites. Recent migrants from Venezuela and broader indigenous and Afro-Colombian groups, who all live in the same spaces as the IDPs who were the sole focus of the original research, will be included. Arts-based activities will be used to elicit information from these communities about their knowledge, experiences and understandings of the risks they live with. Community members will receive arts-based training in their legal rights and responsibilities regarding DRR. They will then use arts-based activities to establish DRR networks within their communities. Run by the local neighbourhoods, these networks will continue beyond the duration of the project, empowering communities to take active ownership of DRR practice.Second, the project will deepen engagement with government and civil organisations that work in DRR. Representatives from these organisations will receive training in the use of arts-based methodologies as a tool for working with at-risk communities and collecting information about these communities' knowledge, experiences and needs. A free learning package will be made available to provide training for further organisations and NGOs who work in DRR.Third, the project will tackle negative public perceptions of at-risk communities as 'victims' or passive beneficiaries of state support. Artworks will be created, with the communities' input and in their preferred formats and styles, to be displayed in public spaces chosen by the communities. This will create innovative spaces for marginalised communities to control the framework of their own representation, and articulate their own stories about their strengths, resilience, skills and capacities. At a time of peacebuilding, this will allow for a more pluralistic engagement with the legacy of conflict and with DRR.