Evaluating the use of community co-creation approaches to develop the Disaster Ready! boardgame for disaster risk reduction education in Nepal

Communication and public education are vital to increasing community resilience to natural hazards. Recent disaster risk education initiatives have challenged top-down hierarchical models of outreach by embracing community-led, participatory and co-creation approaches. Here, we evaluate the process of developing the Disaster Ready! boardgame through community co-creation and co-design methods with students and local educational stakeholders. Discussions with communities directly informed the content and play style of the game, and input from student participants shaped the artistic evolution of the game board to include important cultural, social and environmental symbols. The final version of the game is therefore more locally representative and rooted in the lived experiences of communities in rural Nepal. The process of co-creation also facilitated the collaborative development of knowledge on natural hazards through participant-led discussions and dialogues. We highlight that stakeholder and community participation throughout the development phase of serious games, and in other disaster risk reduction (DRR) resources, is vital to producing bespoke and contextually relevant resources for DRR education. Central to the longer-term success and continued use of the game in Nepali schools was also the transfer of agency over the game to local educational facilitators. Through reflexive discussion on our co-creation approach we highlight the limitations in our method and the challenges in creating a fully co-produced resource. This includes the influence of power dynamics and hierarchies of perceived knowledge, where an imbalance in authority over the co-creation process may limit the creative input of the community. We suggest that overcoming these challenges to achieve higher levels of community participation in the co-production process will require greater planning on the part of researchers, as well as funding pathways that support longer term development of trusting, reciprocal and creative relationships with communities and local stakeholders.