Questioning knowledge foundation

The continued significant impacts of disasters from natural hazards raise questions regarding the epistemic commensurability of measures recommended to achieve substantial disaster risk reduction. Using the case of Flood Risk Reduction (FRR), this study critically reviews key scientific literature on the epistemic foundations of the indigenous, scientific, and integrated knowledge perspectives to disaster risk reduction. Results suggest that the adoption of measures for FRR is determined by how related or detached, in their lived experiences, communities-at-risk are from the perspective into which measures are framed. Yet the increasingly recommended integrated knowledge perspective rarely grasps lived experience. Therefore, an extension of the integrated knowledge perspective is proposed based on an analogy with the philosophical theory of hylomorphism to derive a hylomorphic framework. This framework elaborates how appropriate knowledge integration for FRR should be founded at a composite of two intrinsic elements: the indigenous lived experience of a specific flood prone context (i.e., the hyle) and the context-specific flood risk science (i.e., the morphe).