Published works

This Annual Report summarises progress to date on Building Best Practice in Child-Centred Disaster Risk Reduction (CC-DRR), with a focus on 2015-16.  The first 2.5 years has included scoping and review, the development of a conceptual framework to guide the research, an utilisation roadmap, and the initiation of pilot and main research.  The CC-DRR Project conceptual framework reflects a parsimonious research narrative designed to build on research-policy-practice progress to date but, critically, solve problems and challenges across that nexus.  The narrative itself has two guiding questions as follows:

• Are CC-DRR programs effective?
  • Are they stakeholder supported and evidence-based?
  • Do they reflect practice-based evidence, including support for child and youth learning outcomes and for DRR and resilience outcomes?
  • Do they produce cost savings-related outcomes?
• Can CC-DRR programs be implemented effectively, including in scaled, and sustainable, ways?
  • In practice settings including school- and community-based?
  • In disaster- and emergency management-related policy?

Research to date has commenced and is ongoing across these major areas.  This includes research started in 2014-15, but continuing in 2015-16, focused on major stakeholders’ views, including children and youth, households and parents/caregivers, teachers and school personnel, emergency management/DRR professionals. It includes in 2015-16 initial research on CC-DRR-related student learning and DRR/resilience program outcomes, commencement of costings-related research, and research on implementation obstacles and facilitators for schools and emergency management agencies.  With project End Users as primary stakeholders, 2015-16 reflected many consultations and end user capacity-building workshopping. This included their direct involvement in the Project to ensure that current CC-DRR-focused disaster resilience education (DRE) programs reflect their needs and reflect theory and promising, good and best practices (i.e., Through a “co-development and co-evaluation” process with End Users, 2015-16 included developing and refining a CC-DRR Practice Framework. Since its development, the Framework has begun to be used to systematically evaluate End User agency DRE programs to ensure they reflect evidence-based practices (EBP’s). The framework incorporates three core dimensions (design, implementation, evaluation) and three guiding principles (collaboration and partnership, protection and participation, diversity and equity) (see Figure 1 on p. 24). 

These agency-based DRE programs are now being examined for “practice-based evidence” (PBE), including child learning outcomes and DRR and resilience outcomes.  Both EBP and PBE steps are couched within an implementation framework, with project research designed to support both policy- and practice-based implementation of CC-DRR/DRE programs. Research on implementation began in 2014-15 and continues in 2015-16, including the commencement of a PhD study on EM agency implementation policies and practices.  This report goes into more detail on this program of research and related activities, including summarising progress in CC-DRR research to date, as well as some important challenges that have been identified.