The Integration of Social Science for Community Engagement in the Humanitarian Fields of Conflicts and Disasters: A Scoping Review

Luisa Toro-Alzate, Paola Maffi, Anu Puri, Rania Elessawi, Maria Falero Cusano, Jozefien Groenendijk and Daniel H. de Vries ()
Additional contact information
Luisa Toro-Alzate: Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development (AIGHD), 1105 BP Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Paola Maffi: Athena Institute, VU University, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Anu Puri: UNICEF Europe and Central Asian, 1211 Geneva, Switzerland
Rania Elessawi: UNICEF NY Headquarters, Social Behavior Change, New York, NY 10017, USA
Maria Falero Cusano: UNICEF NY Headquarters, Social Behavior Change, New York, NY 10017, USA
Jozefien Groenendijk: Athena Institute, VU University, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Daniel H. de Vries: Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development (AIGHD), 1105 BP Amsterdam, The Netherlands

IJERPH, 2023, vol. 20, issue 19, 1-13

Abstract: Community engagement (CE) is essential to humanitarian assistance, and the social sciences have been credited in recent epidemics and disease outbreaks as having played a crucial, supportive role. Broadening this attention to other humanitarian fields, this scoping review asks what lessons learned can be found in grey and peer-reviewed literature on the integration of the social sciences in CE for conflicts and disasters. Using an analytical framework developed through a UNICEF-led project called Social Science for Community Engagement (SS4CE) in Humanitarian Action, we identified 1093 peer reviewed publications and 315 grey literature reports of possible relevance. The results show that only a small minority—18 publications and 4 reports—tangibly comment on the relevance of social sciences, mostly only in passing and implicitly. While social science techniques are used and the importance of understanding a community’s cultural, linguistic, and religious context is emphasized, further discussion on the integration of transdisciplinary and multidisciplinary social sciences is absent. Furthermore, CE is mostly seen as an instrumental (‘means to an end’) involvement, for example to collect data in emergency situations and receive feedback on interventions, but not as a critical and transformative intervention. We conclude that unlike the attention given to social sciences in disease outbreaks, there is a knowledge gap and an accordingly proper planning and implementation gap regarding the potentiality of social science to improve CE across all humanitarian contexts of disasters and conflicts.

Keywords: community engagement; social sciences; humanitarian action; conflict; hazards; disasters (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/20/19/6856/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/20/19/6856/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:20:y:2023:i:19:p:6856-:d:1250212

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().