Addressing climate change-driven health crisis with positive deviance approach

With rising anthropogenic climate change, Indian society much like any other is subject to newer health crises and pathogen-outbreaks, that can affect well-being of the population and hinder the development. The nature of the problem suggests that India may not have the liberty for reparative measures, and therefore, calls for a system in place that systematically handles the issue of health in changing climate. The Positive Deviance (PD) approach is concerned with identifying “outliers” also known as “positive deviants” in any population, who should have exhibited a certain behaviour/trait/reaction to abnormal conditions, but in fact they do not. The unusual but replicable behaviours and practices of the outliers are identified and disseminated in the population. The paper envisages the use of Positive Deviance approach on operational and communication fronts, to address the aforementioned problem, and proposes an organized system that would incorporate elements of PD in the systemic structure. Operational Front looks at how health professionals in public and private sector addresses the crisis by virtue of their proximity to the population, as well as organized data collection across the board and its assessment. Communication Front is concerned with dissemination of the knowledge in different segments of the population by the use of media and other outreach methods. A special emphasis is placed on how traditional and new media can be utilized to successfully drive change differently. The qualitative analysis is drawn from assessing multiple case studies and research papers on positive deviance approach applied to healthcare, development and communication problems.