The Role of Local Participation in Flood Risks Management in Rural Areas Case study: Villages in the Bashar River Basin in Boyer Ahmad City

Among the various environmental hazards, flood is the greatest and most important climate crisis which takes every year the lives of thousands people and impose severe damages on human society and environment. Today, it is clear that controlling all hazards, including floods is not possible. Suitable management can only minimize the damages. The literature on natural disasters management indicated that in the process of natural disaster management and their vulnerability mitigation, there are two dominant paradigm: technic-based approach and community-based approach.
Community-based approach welcome the local cooperation and participation in disaster management process and calls for strengthening local capacity through the participation of all individuals and groups at the local level. This approach is not only appropriate to provide solutions for disaster reduction, but build disaster preparedness. Because disaster preparedness planning requires special attention to local participation. In the geographic area of Bashar River Basin, due to the lack of suitable agricultural land and greater quantity of water for rice crop, villages have been built at rivers edge. So that, most of the houses and farms in the villages are located very close to the river. However, these locations are extremely vulnerable to flooding. This study reviews the status of local participation and its impact on reducing flood risks. Also, this research focuses on factors influencing local community trends and choices in the participation rate.
This study is applied research in terms of purpose and uses descriptive-analytical method. According to the nature of the study, data were collected through fieldwork and library research methods using observation, interview, questionnaire and evaluation card techniques. To understand different characteristics of community, Likert scale and one-sample t-test were used and measurement scale for data was ordinal. Also. The method of selective experimental approach based on profit was taken to evaluate the level of different trends in Community's financial participation for reducing detrimental effects of flood. To recognize the community awareness and perception toward flood risk and the probability of its occurrence in the future, the willingness level to participation and to explore the effective factors on villager’s decisions and to utilize modern management techniques the selective experimental approach based on evaluation card and logit model were employed.
The results of statistical analysis showed that in the study area, 86.5% of the community have experienced the damages caused by flooding and forecasted the likelihood of heightened chance of flooding in the future. Finding showed that although the people use traditional methods for managing flood, but they tend to employ modern methods such as dam building for reducing flood risk. This help them to increase the safety factor for their locations and farm lands. In spite of the fact that the villagers expressed the higher safety factor for new management methods such as (dam building, river broadening and preventing the destruction of forest and environment), but it seems that improper functioning, adverse consequences (environmental and socio-economic) of projects implementation (dam building) as well as the inability of villager's financial participation (high cost of this kind of methods), are barriers to using them for lowering the flood risks and damages.
The review of the possible role of some intervening variables to predict local communitie's participation in decision-making processes showed that low-income, old age of the samples with high average (47.61) and education with lower average (3.16) are the most important factors influencing community decision making. The results of binominal logit model showed that the proposed variables is significant at the 5% level. If the offer price increase, the chance of resident's acceptance of participation will decrease and vice versa.