New Frameworks for Building Resilience in Hazard Management

Over the last 50 years, the human, environmental and economic cost of natural and climate-induced disasters has increased globally. Such disasters are expected to increase in frequency and magnitude, bringing increased risk of loss. Systematic efforts to reduce disaster risks are vitally needed and should be increasingly founded on risk and resilience assessments. In this chapter, it is argued that the public scrutiny of recent disasters stimulated changes in the legal framework of civil protection and governance policies related to natural hazards and associated vulnerabilities. It is shown how the new institutional and legal framework was strategically integrated by local populations in their mitigation practices, appealing to past practices and memories but also to the new challenges posed by the building up of official emergency plans, hazard zoning and new technical instruments and practices. In this confrontation between the national laws, the municipalities’ technicians and rulings and the mundane practices of hazard preparedness and mitigation, a new public awareness emerged that allowed for a discussion of priorities, inclusion dynamics, effectiveness of the alert messages and the production of new ways of participating in the public sphere and new dimensions to define citizenship and political belonging. This chapter analyses the conceptual, technical and practical dimension of such processes by highlighting the different components and dynamics of relevant frameworks.