ISO 22392:2020 pdf downloadSecurity and resilience – Communityresilience – Guidelines for conducting peer reviews.
A peer review to enhance community resilience is a unique and privileged opportunity for a host country, region, city or community to engage in a constructive process to reflect on its activities with a team of independent professionals, e.g. on disaster risk reduction (DRR). It encourages conversations, promotes the exchange of good practice, and examines the performance of the entity being reviewed to enhance mutual learning and so can be of value to those who seek to further develop their practices. It can enhance preparedness for an incident and support learning from incidents and exercises. It is different to an audit in that a peer review may be optional, and an organization can design it according to its needs.
A peer review can be a catalyst for change and can enrich learning through bringing together a multidisciplinary panel of trusted and competent experts from a range of technical, political and cultural backgrounds to concentrate on the host’s situation. In the most beneficial peer reviews, both the host and the reviewers benefit by collecting and analysing the latest intelligence (understanding and information about the context), discussing the current situation, generating ideas, and exploring new opportunities to further strengthen activities in their own context. Mutual learning is facilitated by sharing good practice, identifying alternative approaches to policy and operations, and exploring critical questioning to consider how similar challenges are confronted elsewhere. Trusted relationships can form that can facilitate the development of innovative solutions to challenges.
These benefits are one reason why conducting peer reviews is consistent with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015_2030[Zl and its global target to have more countries with national and local strategies for DRR by 2020. Conducting peer reviews to enhance DRR also complements the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 11 to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainableL4], as it seeks to align entities through an integrated approach and sharing learning and benchmark information between hosts and reviewers. The guidelines in this document can also contribute to enhancing resilience and risk reduction.
The entities that can benefit from peer reviews include national, regional, local and organizational levels of governance, which may voluntarily engage with a peer review, or do so as part of a wider initiative of improvement. The peer review process for enhancing community resilience described in ISO 22392 is not intended to be used as means for comparing one entity with another. Instead, it encourages crossborder cooperation to understand and improve performance. Since every host and team of reviewers are different, the outcome of each review will be too. The key to success is having one question at the forefront of the peer review: What will most help us all to enhance our performance?
Figure 1 provides an overview of how to conduct a peer review.
ISO 22392 gives guidelines for organizations to design, organize, conduct, receive feedback from and learn from a peer review of their disaster risk reduction (DRR) policies and practices. It is also applicable to other community resilience activities. It is intended for use by organizations with the responsibility for, or involvement in, managing such activities including policy and preparedness, response and recovery operations, and designing preventative measures (e.g. for the effects of environmental changes such as those from climate change).
It is applicable to all types, structures and sizes of organizations, such as local, regional and national governments, statutory bodies, non-governmental organizations, businesses, and public and community groups. It is applicable before or after an incident or exercise.
4.2 Decide the level of administration to be peer reviewed
Peer reviews can be an effective approach to reflect on the activities being conducted at any level of administration. The host should decide whether the peer review should focus on the national, regional, local or organizational levels.
More than one level of administration may be the focus of the peer review, in which case, the amount of time available for the peer review should be increased to reflect the added complexity.
4.3 Agree the expected benefits of the peer review
The peer review should have expected benefits for the host and for reviewers and these should be agreed before organizing the peer review to provide clear expected impacts from the outcomes of the review.
There should be expected benefits for each selected analysis area (see 4.9) to ensure clarity of the measurable improvement being sought.
The host and reviewers should define each of their expected benefits. This should:
— agree with their interested parties the benefits they expect from participating in the review (e.g. benefits to their performance, analysis areas, or other benefits such as learning or networking);
— describe each benefit and identify the benefit owner who is responsible for it (i.e. who will: plan the timing of changes to deliver the benefit; prepare the context for the changes; implement the changes; manage the changes to avoid negative side-effects);
— define the objectives (see 4,4) that support each benefit;
— identify a measure of each benefit, including a current value for the measure and a target change in the value as a result of the peer review; if a benefit is not measurable directly, then a proxy measure should be identified;
— communicate information on benefits to each other (i.e. the reviewers should communicate their expectations to the host, and vice versa);
— consider these expectations when planning the peer review process (see 5.3) to ensure all expectations are addressed.
4.8 Identify parties who are interested in the peer review
The host should identify organizations and individuals, groups and partners with an interest in the process or outcome of the peer review to consider if they should be involved in the design and delivery of the review. The host should:
— identify parties with an interest in enhancing performance (e.g. elected officials, those indirectly or directly affected by the review, those wishing to learn from the review, citizens and their representatives);
— consider the implications of involving or not involving interested parties in the peer review process;
— decide if and how interested parties should be involved in the peer review process;
— review who are the important interested parties once the analysis areas have been selected (see 4.9).
Examples of interested party groups include government officials, responders, private sector staff, academics, citizens, citizen representatives and elected officials.ISO-22392-2020