Covid-19: A Watershed Moment for Collective Approaches to Community Engagement?

"[A] scenario is emerging where innovation, adaptation and bricolage around a rapidly changing global emergency could lead to long-term fundamental changes in how CCE is implemented and resourced."

In recent years, there have been growing efforts to develop more collective approaches to communication and community engagement (CCE) to improve the quality and effectiveness of humanitarian responses. Experience on the part of the Humanitarian Policy Group (HPG) at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) has shown that working collectively can ensure the right actors are working in the right configuration to integrate CCE into their efforts, reducing duplication while increasing effectiveness. This briefing paper examines collective approaches to CCE in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic - explaining why these approaches hold promise but face challenges, and offering concrete recommendations for humanitarians using CCE during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

The HPG holds that it is crucial that crisis-affected populations have access to consistent, relevant, and accurate information from sources they trust, as well as to feedback channels that service providers use to respond to their evolving needs, preferences, and concerns. Yet, during the global COVID-19 pandemic, the combination of lockdowns and other coercive measures to control the disease, alongside rampant misinformation spreading through social media, have added to a sense of uncertainty and mistrust among crisis-affected communities. Furthermore, physical distancing requirements have challenged international and local humanitarian actors to find ways to connect with vulnerable populations remotely/digitally and yet in ways that build trust, given there is an almost universal preference for face-to-face communication. It is in such a context that collective approaches to CCE are so important yet complex.

For the purpose of this briefing note, collective approaches to CCE are defined as multi-actor initiatives that encompass the humanitarian response as a whole, rather than a single individual agency or programme. They focus on two-way communication: providing information about the situation and services to affected communities; gathering information from these communities via feedback, perspectives, and inputs; and closing the feedback loop by informing the communities as to how their input has been taken into account. The goal of a collective approach to CCE is the increased accountability to and participation of affected communities in their own response (Barbelet 2020: 9).

In the context of COVID-19, collective CCE can support affected people to make informed decisions, manage risk, and highlight their evolving needs and priorities. By harmonising messaging and ensuring it is deployed through multiple, complementary channels, collective CCE can reduce the risk of fragmented and incoherent communications that could breed confusion or undermine trust. It can also establish systems for gathering inter-agency feedback, create space for joint analysis of this feedback, and ensure that it serves as a basis for high-level advocacy that pushes for responses to be more adaptive to communities' rapidly evolving needs. Furthermore, by offering a common entry point, collective CCE can strengthen coordination or collaboration with government and development actors engaged in overlapping activities - especially risk communication - around COVID-19.

However, attempts at collective CCE have experienced a number of challenges, including:

• Global commitments around the need for more systematic and better CCE are yet to be matched by clear progress on the ground.
• The inability to agree on what CCE is and should look like in a response limits its uptake at a system-wide level.
• At a country level, it is rare to see CCE being considered in the preparedness phase, resulting in missed opportunities to explore and develop complementary roles of local actors and to engage government leadership.
• There has not been enough consideration of CCE as a political issue as well as a technical process.
• Trust deficits are a growing concern.
• It is not always easy to determine what configuration of approach is the right "fit" for a given crisis.
• When it comes to a public health crisis such as COVID-19, there are only a few examples of collective approaches to CCE, and the global track record is mixed.

To address these and other challenges, the briefing note outlines key considerations for actors seeking to set up or strengthen a collective approach to CCE in response to COVID-19, including:

• Have well-defined objectives in the design phase, a clear relationship to the rest of the response, strong links to key decision-making processes, and a willingness to cut through the semantics of differing terminologies (CCE vs. risk communication and community engagement (RCCE), communication for development (C4D), etc.);
• Be supported by staff with strong coordination and leadership skills, as well as by flexible funding mechanisms that operate in a transparent and accountable manner and enable collective action;
• Be inclusive of a wide range of actors, make space for locally-driven, bottom-up approaches, and foster a sense of common ownership to ensure buy-in; and
• Ensure that affected populations have multiple channels for two-way dialogue that include the most marginalised.

Thinking beyond COVID-19, these actors are advised to start long-term planning early, finding ways to ensure that time and resources invested in collective approaches are sustainable - for example, by incorporating CCE into preparedness planning through links to national disaster risk reduction architecture. Doing so can help ensure that the knowledge and relationships generated by collective approaches are not lost, and that they can be scaled up rapidly as new crises inevitably emerge. "Collective approaches that maintain a wider focus from the start will be better placed to take new challenges in their stride."

Moving forward, the HPG suggests monitoring and documenting trends as they emerge in order to ensure that successes can be effectively built on and course corrections made. Particular trends to watch are as follows:

• To what extent is the COVID-19 crisis leading to fundamental changes in how the humanitarian system resources, plans, and prioritises community engagement?
• How is the COVID-19 crisis changing the humanitarian system in ways that make effective CCE more critical?
• What new approaches are being successfully adopted to strengthen CCE in the context of COVID-19? How have these been helped or hindered?
• Is the crisis leading to changes in the level of meaningful participation by affected populations in humanitarian decision-making and responses?
• To what extent is CCE being built into preparedness agendas and linked to government-led communication processes?
• Can an increased focus on CCE be leveraged to further the localisation agenda, given the critical role of local actors for effective engagement?
• Where changes have occurred, which ones are likely to be sustained, and which are likely to revert to the pre-COVID-19 status quo? Why?