ABSTRACT
Religious institutions, particularly those at the community level, continue to serve as worship and networking places, building world views and fulfilling social and economic needs of their communities all over the world, in varying capacities. Despite valuing the grassroots outreach of these institutions, governments and disaster-related agencies have engaged with religious institutions in a manner that has been predominantly ad hoc, transactional and short term rather than transformational and long term. Beyond selective engagement during response and relief, an effective engagement of humanitarian actors with religious institutions would entail regular interactions between the two to identify, mitigate and prevent disaster risk, to share mutual resources and learning and to co-design and produce contextualised and inclusive disaster risk reduction knowledge and plans to save lives and reduce disaster losses. Including reflections on the ongoing COVID-19 health pandemic, this chapter presents an overview of the critical issues hindering this effective engagement and how opportunities can be leveraged to build synergies.
