A methodology for identifying, documenting and extrapolating potential good practices in disaster risk management

Making evidence-based decisions in Disaster Risk Management is crucial for practitioners. However, it remains unclear how to systematically identify and characterize potential good practices to build upon available experiences. This paper proposes a methodology for identifying, documenting, and extrapolating potential good practices in Disaster Risk Management from the literature with a procedure that consists of five steps. Step 1 involves defining the general premises that guide the search for good practices based on well-established literature within a specific field. Step 2 selects a suitable framework to derive requirements that must be met by the practices. In Step 3, potential good practices are identified through the collection of case studies that encapsulate them, while criteria to select case studies are defined. Step 4 utilises a template to document the practices and their context of implementation. Step 5, finally, compares the practices described in the case studies against the requirements and general premises to extrapolate, among them, those practices that are potentially good (i.e., those that can work in similar contexts). To better illustrate its applicability, the methodology was implemented in the domain of disaster risk and crisis communication. The application of this methodology enables practitioners to capture features of a good practice in a given context and assess their replicability across contexts.