How Well Do DRR Facts and Ideas Travel?

It is understood that scientific facts often travel from their production to their place of use reflecting the complexity of Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) knowledge production and usage. There are countless scientific facts and evidence that can be used to build community resilience. Unfortunately, scientific facts and evidence are often structured within territorial boundaries of disciplinary knowledge. Like human, facts and ideas also travel. In today’s digital world, facts and ideas travel faster through virtual spaces as well as physical spaces as people cross borders. This paper adopts ‘traveling facts’ theory of Morgan (2009) and ‘traveling theory’ (Said 1982) to understand how scientific facts travel and used to inform DRR practices across places. In this research we ask question: How can we characterise the life cycle of DRR scientific facts (e.g. of that early warning system save lives or a specific construction techniques and concrete design can reduce and minimise seismic risk)? Using “traveling facts” theory and/or “traveling theory” we examine how a particular DRR knowledge that travels across physical and virtual places? The study recommends a rethinking in present design of community resilience.