Gall, M., S. L. Cutter, and K. Nguyen (2014). Governance in Disaster Risk Management (IRDR AIRDR Publication No. 3). Beijing: Integrated Research on Disaster Risk.
Disaster risk governance has traditionally been fragmented between local, state, and national entities and between sectors, and compartmentalised in highly variable bureaucratic structures. Risk governance is mostly viewed through the lens of disaster or emergency management departments, agencies, or organisations, which often have little interaction among other governmental, civil society, or corporate entities. Visible in times of crises, risk governance is rarely seen as part of everyday public or private functions such as planning, social welfare, investments or fiscal responsibilities.
This literature review summarises our current scientific knowledge on the emerging field of disaster governance: what we know about governance and disaster risk management; how it has evolved over the past years; and where the research gaps are in our present knowledge. This overview builds on the efforts by the IRDR working group on the Assessment of Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (AIRDR) to provide the science-based evidence for the development of the post-2015 framework for disaster risk reduction (IRDR 2013).
Three key policy questions are addressed in this review:
- What are the principal drivers of changes in disaster risk governance characteristics at national and local scales over the last decade?
- Is disaster risk governance a separate and autonomous concern/theme or is it a component of sustainable development at local to national scales, and how do international governance frameworks influence it?
- How is the linkage between climate change adaptation and disaster risk management established and how does this influence the present governance of risk?