Community-Based Disaster Management in Iran: Strengths, Challenges, and Recommendations

Introduction: the limitation of relief forces from various aspects and the impossibility of the presence of specialist forces in the affected area immediately after the disaster has made it a necessity to use the capacity of the people and local communities in the government’s response to disasters. this article aimed to identify the strengths and challenges of community-based crisis management in iran and provide recommendations for expanding this approach. methods: the present research was conducted using a qualitative method, through indepth semi-structured interviews with 13 experts and 12 subjects who had participated in community-based disaster management activities. the selection of people for the interview was done through targeted sampling using the snowball method. examination and extraction of data were performed using the thematic analysis method, and the obtained data were classified in the form of strengths, challenges, and recommendations for adopting a community-based approach to disaster management in iran. results: as a result of reviewing and analyzing the interview texts, 567 codes were extracted. in the next step, by removing duplicate codes and merging them, research results were presented in the form of strengths and challenges of community-based disaster management in iran, and recommendations were presented to expand this approach. the main challenges of implementing this approach included social expectations, parallel work of organizations, numerous changes in the management of organizations, multiplicity of educational content, and the goals of the executors from the implementation of community-based programs. against these challenges, strengths such as the existence of social bases at the neighborhood level, participation of donors, and development of individual skills and capabilities were extracted. conclusion: the findings of this research provide a general and comprehensive view of the challenges and strengths of adopting a community-based disaster management approach in iran. despite the existence of many challenges such as people’s priorities, social expectations, parallel work of organizations, and many managerial changes in the implementation of this approach, there are many strengths and experiences in this regard in the country that can facilitate the implementation of this approach. factors such as the participation of benefactors and existence of different capacities and social bases in the localities are valuable components in applying the community-based disaster management approach in iran.