Massey Documents by Type

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‘One big team working together’ - Shifting narratives to encourage civic participation and collective action in disaster preparedness
(Elsevier Ltd, 2025-02-15) Das M; Becker J; Doyle EEH
Disaster risks cannot be reduced by individual efforts alone and necessitate community participation and collective action. However, communicating and encouraging collective action is difficult. Existing studies show that stories and narratives are useful to convey complex less-understood phenomena, like disasters, in a comprehendible and relatable manner. As such, this paper explores existing disaster narratives and aims to understand how they encourage civic participation and collective action for reducing disaster risks. The findings show that the framing of disasters in mass media narratives are unlikely to encourage collective action as they do not emphasize citizen's agency and efficacy in reducing disaster risks. However, in the narratives shared at the local level between emergency management agencies and community members, there is currently a shift towards emphasizing community agency, efficacy, and responsibilities in reducing disaster risks. Four dominant themes are identified in these narratives: reframing the concept of heroes, promoting connection and care, emphasizing collective efficacy and collective responsibility. While the narratives are beneficial, they also cause some tensions, such as, confusion arising from lingering response-centric narratives; frustration around the collective responsibility narratives; and resistance to the current narratives as they are perceived as attempts by emergency management agencies to transfer emergency management responsibilities to people. The implications of the findings and the future directions are presented.
Fostering civic participation and collective actions for disaster risk reduction: Insights from Aotearoa New Zealand case studies
(Elsevier Ltd., 2024-11-03) Das M; Becker J; Doyle EEH
This paper explores how community members collaborate with emergency management organizations in the pre-disaster stage and engage in collective actions for reducing disaster risks in their communities. Utilizing four qualitative case studies from New Zealand, we examined how local groups interested in reducing community level disaster risks form, the nature of their collective actions and collaboration with emergency management organizations, their facilitators and barriers and the outcomes of the processes. The findings suggest that people's involvement, collaboration, and collective action in the pre-disaster stage entails participating in programmes administered by emergency management organizations through diverse community groups, informal emergency response teams, and specialized volunteer groups. The two primary goals are to have a group of people ready to provide immediate support in an event by maintaining community response teams and making prior arrangements that support people to spontaneously volunteer in an emergency, through community emergency hub approach. These groups engage in tasks such as creating community response plans, maintaining resources, and fostering communication and social capital. The factors facilitating these efforts include hazard awareness, community conversations, institutional support and active DRR organizations, clear objectives, skilled facilitators, and ensuring community solutions are supported. However, currently, community involvement in the pre-disaster stage is narrowly focused on improving response outcomes, lacking a broader perspective of addressing developmental and environmental issues that create risks. They are also rooted in the idea of a solidaristic community and rely on social capital. We discuss the implications of the current practices and the way forward.
Collective action : improving smallholder rice farmers' value chain in Yogyakarta, Indonesia : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of AgriCommerce, at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand
(Massey University, 2017) Ahmad, Shaf Rijal
Collective action has been widely accepted as one of the strategies to improve smallholder farmers’ capability to gain benefit from the agrifood value chain. This is also part of the working policy of the Government of Indonesia. Nevertheless, there is little empirical evidence for staple food farmers, particularly rice, in organising collective action and many such attempts have not met the policy’s implementation objectives. Considering the importance of rice agribusiness in Indonesia, therefore, there is a need to investigate experiences of smallholder rice farmers who work collectively and are able to improve their value chain and gaining benefit from it. The objectives of this study were to identify and describe what benefit captured through collective action and how, and; to identify and describe how these farmers act collectively within a group and why. The research question was answered and objectives addressed by using a qualitative single case study. A farmer group named Gapoktan Sidomulyo was selected, as it was identified by the central and local government as a well-developed collective farmers’ group. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with farmers and other actors relevant to the group development. This study found that collective action helped smallholder rice farmers to build a competitive advantage. This action enabled them to improve production capacity and product quality, as well as human capability and bargaining power. This also helped them to reduce the number of intermediaries. Therefore, they can capture the potential value offered by the rice value chain. This study also highlighted essential factors for smallholder rice farmers’ collective action: Firstly, this action required incentives and support as well as a motivated group of farmers. Even when collective action was supported by government, it was essential to motivate farmers to act collectively and see the benefits for doing so. Secondly, trust and a shared vision between members of the farmer group was important element for collective action. These formed the basis for building horizontal relationships between farmers. This affected the reciprocity between them and their commitment. Thirdly, in a group that was heterogeneous, in terms of religion and reliance on farming as an income source, group cohesion could be achieved through effective group management, which means management that promoting transparency and active communication between farmers and the leadership team, and giving an opportunity for each actor within the group to play their role. These reduced the potential of conflict and maintain the farmers’ awareness on the group so that they keep engaged within the group. Fourthly, leadership with strong motivation, good interpersonal skills, social awareness, as well as administration and marketing skills were essential for the group’s development. Unlike to what has been identified in many studies, the leadership could also be provided by a team of people, instead of relying on an individual. Fifthly, maintaining the active members and the leadership team’s participation was essential as they were the key actors within the group. For the active farmers, this was achieved through: facilitating members to raise their voice and be involved in decision making, involving them to enforce rules, and conducting activity that attract them to attend regular meetings. Meanwhile, for the leadership team members, this could be achieved through conducting an appropriate leadership team selection process and acknowledging their effort in fostering the group. Lastly, despite there was a culture to work as a group, it was important for having trusted external agents to facilitate farmers and motivate them to act collectively, particularly when this required money in initiating the action. The support from external agents, such as technology and finance, was also important to build farmers capability in improving the value chain. In addition, this case highlighted that only some farmers were able to gain benefit through this action and they were who can produce consistently volume beyond their household requirements. Keywords: Smallholder farmers, collective action, rice value chain, agriculture, rice, Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

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