Risk communication strategy for disaster preparedness viewed as multilateral knowledge development

Multilateral knowledge development is proposed as a perspective for risk communication to increase disaster preparedness at community level. This is a participatory community management process where roles of risk experts are shared by citizens, nonprofit organizations and researchers in order to deal with a problem with much uncertainty. As these three agents interact and share ideas on local vulnerability, the community can find their own mitigation measures. Urban diagnosis is a reasonable strategy to support this risk communication process. In the paper, diagnosis method takes the form of a questionnaire survey. Researchers contribute to the process by designing and analyzing the survey. As implementation of the concept, a case study for this diagnostic questionnaire is demonstrated. The discussion includes analysis of regional comparison, cognition gap in preparedness between citizens and NPOs and distribution of individual citizens in a community.