AGCI Session I: Natural Hazards and Global Change

Session Chairs: Louis Walter and E. L. Quarantelli - July 10 to 20, 1996

Joanne Nigg

On the Social Process of Adopting Technology

From a community perspective, reducing the impacts of disasters is not a technical problem, it is a social one. Local governments have the primary responsibility and authority to establish land use policies to restrict development in hazardous areas, to enact building codes to lessen the extent to which the built environment is vulnerable to disaster impacts, and to improve preparedness planning and disaster impacts. The perceptions about the risks associated with local hazards, understandings about what can or should be done to reduce their impacts, the availability of existing resources special expertise, adequate personnel, accessible technology, and financial revenues all have implications for the approaches communities take in making decisions about the management of risks to which they are exposed.

While there are many existing technologies that promise exciting new possibilities for monitoring hazards and for managing disasters remote sensing, satellite communications, radar systems, decision support systems, to name a few we should not forget that these are only tools. For tools to be adopted and effectively used, they need to be integrated into existing organizational structures and occupational repertoires of those people who are intended to operate them. Currently, many of these technologies do not have any linkages to existing programs within the majority of local communities that can make use of them.

We should not assume that these technologies will be automatically utilized once local communities are made aware of them. Change in organizational structure and culture occurs slowly in non-crisis times. In order to improve the likelihood of adoption of these technologies and their products, it will be important to develop mechanisms that will translate the information deriving from these innovations into messages and procedures that can be used by local governments to understand the nature of the hazards and the imminence of their risk and vulnerability. In many cases, resistance to the adoption of innovation occurs because the meaning of the new information is ambiguous, the expertise required to use the technology (both hardware and software) does not reside in an existing organizational unit, and the programmatic implications of the resulting information for disaster reduction efforts is unclear. Careful consideration must be given to the operational systems that may eventually use these technologies, because their adoption will be dependent on the ease of their social utility to the local community rather than on their technological sophistication.

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