Through this section on building effective partnership, we highlighted the following points: 

• Disaster risk reduction activities require interdisciplinary and cross-sector partnerships.
  
• Interdisciplinary partnerships not only enable effective integration of natural science knowledge and methods with the social sciences, arts, and humanities, but also helps link research to practice in order to anticipate and reduce the damage caused by natural hazards.
  
• There are different types of partnerships. It is important to listen to those you are working with, to understand what they hope to gain from the partnership and what types of partnership are therefore needed.
• Citizen science provides a means by which the public can contribute to research design and data collection and interpretation.

The following recommendations or suggested actions may be relevant in your work context:

• Build partnerships with a range of social scientists to help put natural hazard science in its broader societal context.
• Higher education and ongoing professional development training should include partnership development topics (e.g., project management, facilitation skills, and inter- and transdisciplinary working).
• Natural hazard scientists should implement ethical framework for building and maintaining equitable partnership.
• Funding opportunities should recognize and provide for the time and resources required to build partnerships.
• Institutional support for partnerships can ensure mutually agreed expectations, codes of practice and ethics. Roles and responsibilities within partnership should be discussed and clarified.
• Funding for researchers should be based in the region of study to help strengthen both knowledge exchange and sustainability of the impact.

Click Next Page to complete this module, and access the post-module self-evaluation and further resources relating to this topic.