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Community participation in landslide risk reduction: a case history from Central Andes, Peru

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Abstract

This article describes the intertwined history of scientific research and landslide disaster risk reduction efforts in a small peasant community in the Rampac Grande of the Peruvian Andes. It was struck by a catastrophic landslide in 2009, claiming five fatalities and challenging local knowledge about landslide occurrence and mitigation practices. This article describes collaboration between a team of scientists, comprising both foreign and Peruvian experts and the local community, which started after the 2009 landslide and culminated during the disaster risk reduction (DRR) project which ran from 2016 to 2017. It illustrates the shift from refusing outside intervention to acceptance of the proposed measures and active community participation in their application and maintenance. This was achieved by rethinking the role of local and scientific knowledge during the process of DRR through enhanced communication and the appropriate use of the participative methods. Emphasis is placed on the crucial role played by community representative participation during formulation of the expected outcomes of the DRR, which leads to hazard reduction through the preparation of hazard maps and of the monitoring of landslide movement. Enhanced community development can also be evidenced by the construction of water tanks in the year following termination of the project. Despite the documented short-term success in landslide DRR, defining long-term exit strategy allowing the community to continue applying the measures with necessity of the minimum input from the outside actors is intrinsically difficult and still needs to be resolved.

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Notes

  1. Despite this criticism, we will use the term “community” in this paper, because the case study of Rampac Grande constitutes part of the Ecash peasant community, a term officially coined by government.

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Acknowledgments

This article was prepared thanks to the support from the long-term conceptual development research organization (RVO: 67985891) and Czech Science Foundation project “Individual and organizational decision-making in environmental risk reduction: determinants, motivations and efficiency” (no. 16-02521S).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Engineering Geology, Institute of Rock Structure and Mechanics of The Czech Academy of Sciences, V Holešovičkách 41, 182 09, Prague 8, Czech Republic

    Jan Klimeš

  2. Department of Mountain Ecosystems, Instituto Nacional de Investigación en Glaciares y Ecosistemas de Montaña, Jr. Juan Bautista Mejía 887, Huaraz, Ancash, Peru

    Ana Marlene Rosario

  3. Department of Glacier Research, Instituto Nacional de Investigación en Glaciares y Ecosistemas de Montaña, Jr. Juan Bautista Mejía 887, Huaraz, Ancash, Peru

    Roque Vargas

  4. Department of Geography, Faculty of Science, Jan Evangelista Purkyně University, České mládeže 8, 400 96, Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic

    Pavel Raška

  5. Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, 8057, Zürich, Switzerland

    Luis Vicuña & Christine Jurt

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  1. Jan Klimeš
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Correspondence to Jan Klimeš.

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Klimeš, J., Rosario, A.M., Vargas, R. et al. Community participation in landslide risk reduction: a case history from Central Andes, Peru. Landslides 16, 1763–1777 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10346-019-01203-w

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