Social Media: A Valuable String in the DRR Governance Bow throughout the DRR Cycle

Social media has become an engrained part of everyday life, and also increasingly important to DRR management strategy. Recently, social media has been identified as useful to all phases of the DRR cycle: pre-event, during, and post event, not just during crises (Dufty 2015; Houtson et al., 2015). We present a grounded theory that emerged from the analysis of 22 interviews with social media coordinators from a range of community, NGO, and Government stakeholder from Australia, New Zealand, and the US. The theory suggests that social media can both facilitate and suppress communityengagement at any phase of the DRR cycle, and provides an in-depth understanding of the factors and processes that contribute to each outcome. We discuss the diverse factors and processes that contribute to social media being used in ways that facilitate community-based DRR practices at different phases of the DRR cycle. These processes parallel those identified for effective disaster risk governance (Ahren & Rudolph, 2006), suggesting social media can be used to help govern effectively in the DRR space. This finding implies that it would be valuable for social media and risk governanceresearch to inform each other to provide a more holistic approach to DRR in communities. We propose that rather than only employing social media at times of crisis, social media is a valuable new "string" to the DRR governance bow for facilitating collaboration between stakeholders, building capacity amongst stakeholders throughout the DRR cycle.