Community Engagement in Anticipatory Action: Compendium of Experiences and Good Practices from Focus Countries

Introduction

© FAO/Luis Tato

Anticipatory action (AA) acknowledges vulnerable people as leaders in development and agents of change in their own lives and communities (FAO, 2021). It aims to prevent and/or mitigate the impact of shocks and stresses on vulnerable households through different prevention and mitigation measures applied in relation to a warning or trigger and before the foreseen shock occurs or its impacts are felt. The trigger systems that underpin AA are predicated upon forecasts, and other indicators, signalling a hazard and stress situation for people's lives and livelihoods at a given time.

However, acting early is no guarantee that all at-risk and affected members of a community benefit equally from AA. People’s vulnerability, or their ability to cope with and recover from disasters, largely depends on social, economic, cultural, and political factors – all of which can vary within a community. Among the most vulnerable are persons and groups who, due to a variety of identity markers and socioeconomic factors, have limited means or access to resources to protect their well-being, safeguard their livelihoods, withstand shocks and stresses and recover from their impacts, and cannot participate meaningfully in the decisions that affect their lives.

There is growing acknowledgement of the need to strengthen the active inclusion of at-risk and potentially affected communities in order to address the risk of glossing over local knowledge and expertise, which is still critically undervalued in AA programming. Community engagement is yet to be integrated systematically into the approaches and frameworks conducted by AA, and disaster risk management stakeholders more generally. The lack of active involvement of at-risk and potentially affected communities may also undermine understanding, trust of and support to any form of external assistance by targeted communities, including confidence in AA systems at the frontline of disaster and crisis risk management. Anticipatory action thus necessitates meaningful engagement to work with people and communities who are at risk, or whose practices or behaviours affect risk, in order to consolidate their resilience capacities and put them at the centre of AA programming.

This is why the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), as one of the leading operational organizations implementing and providing technical advice and normative guidance on AA approaches in the agriculture and food security sector, has embarked on a project funded by the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance of the United States Agency for International Development to capture emerging and good practices to improve community engagement in anticipatory action (hereafter referred to as CEAA). This project aims to ensure that FAO and other stakeholders are equipped to facilitate a more inclusive and bottom-up approach to AA programming that reflects and leverages the perspectives, priorities, knowledge and capacities of at-risk and potentially affected communities.

The objective of this project is to expand and strengthen the scope, minimum standards and guidance on modalities for community engagement in the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of AA projects and programmes. The project builds on a Guidance Note published by FAO conceptualizing a spectrum of community engagement approaches to optimize a people-centred design, implementation, monitoring, evaluation and learning of AA, and on experiences and practices in four focus countries: Bangladesh, Guatemala, the Niger and Zimbabwe. These countries were selected based on their geographic spread, the range of anticipated hazards, the stage of development of the national AA systems and varying levels of capacities among AA stakeholders, as well as different intersectional considerations such as demographics, language, livelihoods, human mobility and diversity.

The Compendium identifies and unpacks some of the current practices and approaches to community engagement across the four focus countries and presents opportunities to enhance AA programming and bring about new thinking and ways of working. The Compendium showcases various examples of how community engagement has been promoted and operationalized by FAO and a range of actors, both inside and outside the scope of AA. The purpose of the Compendium is to have a positive impact on the protection of people’s lives and livelihoods through the sharing of knowledge on good and promising practices – which will help the humanitarian and disaster risk management community incrementally move towards more context-specific, conflict-sensitive, inclusive and accountable AA programming.

Although the Compendium currently represents a practitioner’s perspective, the next phase of the CEAA project includes a local-level training, piloting and learning component, reflecting community voices and perceptions regarding some of the community engagement practices and principles outlined in the Compendium.

How to use the Compendium

The Compendium is intended for stakeholders involved in anticipatory action, from the local to national and global levels, within the perspective of a broader disaster risk and emergency response management process, aiming at reducing the impact of predictable shocks and stresses on at-risk and affected populations. It is structured as follows:

A brief introduction gives some background on the CEAA project and the development of the Compendium, led by FAO.

The first section defines key concepts to better understand what is meant by CEAA, as framed and conceptualized by FAO within the scope of the project. It also explains why community engagement is instrumental to quality anticipatory action, while unpacking some of the main challenges and limitations.

The second section starts with a brief presentation of the four focus countries of the CEAA project where national level roundtables were held to identify solutions examples, experiences and good practices of community engagement for AA programming. The criteria and methodology applied for their identification are presented in a follow- up dedicated box. An interactive diagram provides an overview of nearly 60 practices discussed during the roundtables, helping to locate them within the spectrum of community engagement approaches and along the steps of AA programming. The intention is to allow the reader to get a sense of which practice can be useful and relevant to better engage with communities at different stages of