Abstract
Unplanned housing developments in vulnerable communities on steep tropical and subtropical hillslopes in many developing countries pose major problems for the residents themselves; for Governments, in terms of potential relocation costs; for engineers in determining the precise nature of the hazard and risk; and for donor agencies, such as the World Bank, in establishing the form of disaster mitigation policies that should be promoted. We present a new low‐cost, community‐based approach to landslide risk reduction in such a context. It is founded on the vision that there is often sufficient capacity within Governments to address such landslide issues without needing to incur significant additional costs by employing non‐Government specialist staff. Such expenditure adds to debt and only suboptimally builds within‐country capacity. The approach we present develops a cross‐ministry Government management team, implements a community‐based approach to landslide risk assessment, develops low‐cost interventions through the social intervention fund and builds capacity through community knowledge transfer. We report on the successful pilot undertaken in the Skate Town community, Castries, St. Lucia, West Indies. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.