Chloe Begg

The Risk Perception Paradox—Implications for Governance and Communication of Natural Hazards

This article reviews the main insights from selected literature on risk perception, particularly in connection with natural hazards. It includes numerous case studies on perception and social behavior dealing with floods, droughts, earthquakes, volcano eruptions, wild fires, and landslides. The review reveals that personal experience of a natural hazard and trust--or lack of trust--in authorities and experts have the most substantial impact on risk perception. Cultural and individual factors such as media coverage, age, gender, education, income, social status, and others do not play such an important role but act as mediators or amplifiers of the main causal connections between experience, trust, perception, and preparedness to take protective actions. When analyzing the factors of experience and trust on risk perception and on the likeliness of individuals to take preparedness action, the review found that a risk perception paradox exists in that it is assumed that high risk perception will lead to personal preparedness and, in the next step, to risk mitigation behavior. However, this is not necessarily true. In fact, the opposite can occur if individuals with high risk perception still choose not to personally prepare themselves in the face of a natural hazard. Therefore, based on the results of the review, this article offers three explanations suggesting why this paradox might occur. These findings have implications for future risk governance and communication as well as for the willingness of individuals to invest in risk preparedness or risk mitigation actions.

Localism and flood risk management in England: the creation of new inequalities?

There has been a noticeable shift in the way in which flood risks are managed in England. This is being driven in part by European developments but also by changes in governance across diverse domains of public policy. A key characteristic is a move to transfer responsibility for the management of flood risk away from the central government and towards the local level. This paper aims to describe and evaluate the potential implications of this shift by focusing on three connected policy areas: flood defence, spatial planning, and emergency management. We draw on an analysis of policy documentation and expert interviews to map out current changes in governance. We then outline a number of potential scenarios for how these changes may play out in the future, emphasising that differences in resource availability and local motivation could result in new patterns of vulnerability and inequality.

Interactions between citizen responsibilization, flood experience and household resilience: insights from the 2013 flood in Germany

Abstract As increasing emphasis is placed on the importance of citizens’ taking responsibility for their own preparedness and protection against flooding, it is important to understand the relationship between responsibility and action and how current practices of responsibilization influence household resilience. Based on a survey of 889 households affected by flooding in 2013 in the states of Saxony and Bavaria, Germany, this study investigates the relationship between action and flood experience and how this experience influences whether citizens feel responsible, and therefore the likelihood that they will take action in the future. These findings have implications for household resilience as well as future research.

Operationalizing risk perception and preparedness behavior research for a multi-hazard context

ABSTRACT Increasingly, citizens are being asked to take a more active role in disaster risk reduction (DRR), as decentralization of hazard governance has shifted greater responsibility for hazard preparedness actions onto individuals. Simultaneously, the taxonomy of hazards considered for DRR has expanded to include medical and social crises alongside natural hazards. Risk perception research emerged to support decision-makers with understanding how people characterize and evaluate different hazards to anticipate behavioral response and guide risk communication. Since its inception, the risk perception concept has been incorporated into many behavioral theories, which have been applied to examine preparedness for numerous hazard types. Behavioral theories have had moderate success in predicting or explaining preparedness behaviors; however, they are typically applied to a single hazard type and there is a gap in understanding which theories (if any) are suited for examining multiple hazard types simultaneously. This paper first reviews meta-analyses of behavioral theories to better understand performance. Universal lessons learnt are summarized for survey design. Second, theoretically based preparedness studies for floods, earthquakes, epidemics, and terrorism are reviewed to assess the conceptual requirements for a ‘multi-hazard’ preparedness approach. The development of an online preparedness self-assessment and learning platform is discussed.

Power, responsibility and justice: a review of local stakeholder participation in European flood risk management

ABSTRACT Over the past few decades, there has been an increasing interest in the active involvement of local stakeholders in the management of floods in Europe. Such involvement is seen as necessary as the management of floods becomes more complex. Management approaches now seek to include a range of potential measures to reduce risk (e.g. structural defence, spatial planning and property-level protection measures). Local stakeholder involvement is seen to be important because governments lack the capacities such as knowledge and funding required to deliver all these measures alone. This paper focuses on the implications that more participative approaches have on the fairness of European flood risk management (FRM). Studies of environmental justice are well placed to address this question because they are interested in who is included and excluded from decisions related to the distribution of environmental goods (resources) and bads (risks). Existing literature suggests that fair decision-making processes (procedural justice) can lead to fair distribution or resources and risks (distributive justice). This literature review of 30 peer-reviewed papers provides an analysis of justice and FRM by assessing practices of participation which are presented in the recent literature on local stakeholder involvement in FRM in England, Germany and the Netherlands. It was found that participation in practice generally focuses on transferring responsibility to the local level at the expense of power. This paper discusses the implications that this finding has for justice and synthesises potential ways forward based on recommendations of the reviewed literature.

On the Connection Between Urban Sustainability Transformations and Multiple Societal Crises

Crises are a frequent companion of global urbanization; within the last decades, a wide range of crises has influenced the fates of cities and their inhabitants. When reviewing the first two decades of this century, we might feel that we are living in a “time of constant crises”; starting with the real estate and financial crisis in 2007/2008, a wide range of subsequent crises has spread all over the world: various economic, real estate, and bank crises, as well as the Euro debt crisis, which have led to political crises with significant social repercussions, also across Europe (Funke et al. 2015). In addition, a number of wars and violent conflicts such as, e.g., those in Syria and Northern Iraq have caused new crises; in particular, the increased refugee migration towards Europe (preferably to large cities of some European countries), an area that still has to cope with the consequences of the above-mentioned crises. Multiple environmental crises are receiving much less attention at the moment (Gawel 2014). These include biodiversity loss or climate change that evokes extreme events, such as floods or droughts that also regularly impact on cities or urban regions. Last but not least, the increasing demographic polarization of the world’s population, with population decrease and ageing in the developed countries and further population growth in the Global South, are perceived as a long-term crisis that is leading, e.g., to increasing south-north migration at a global scale. Given a situation of “multiple crises”, i.e., crises that differ in their nature but are characterized by many interlinkages concerning their roots and impacts, we can observe emerging crisis-driven policies. These policies vary according to the type of crisis: bank rescues and austerity policies to tackle the financial crisis, diplomacy and border closures to regulate the immigration crisis, massive international climate-protection agendas and meetings to address the climate crisis that are characterized by particular interests and symbolic declarations, and so on.

The role of local stakeholder participation in flood defence decisions in the United Kingdom and Germany: Local stakeholder participation in flood defence decisions in the United Kingdom and Germany

An important aspect of integrated flood risk management around the world is accepted as being the involvement of a range of stakeholders in flood-related decision-making processes. Achieving local stakeholder participation in ways that lead to the expected benefits is burdened by challenges and difficulties. By drawing on examples of practices of local stakeholder participation in flood risk management in two European countries, the United Kingdom and Germany, this paper aims to understand the extent to which local stakeholders are able to influence flood risk management. Empirically, the paper focuses on flood defence planning and implementation-related decisions as they still remain the dominant approach of managing flood risks in those locations. The findings from the two case studies show that involvement of local stakeholders in decisions related to flood defence schemes is limited and likely to lead to conflict and frustration as well as, potentially, a strengthening of inequalities. These lessons have implications for the United Kingdom and Germany as well as for other locations around the world.

The Role of Local Stakeholder Participation in Flood Defence Decisions in the UK and Germany

An important aspect of integrated flood risk management around the world is accepted as being the involvement of a range of stakeholders in flood-related decision-making processes. Achieving local stakeholder participation in ways that lead to the expected benefits is burdened by challenges and difficulties. By drawing on examples of practices of local stakeholder participation in flood risk management in two European countries, the United Kingdom and Germany, this paper aims to understand the extent to which local stakeholders are able to influence flood risk management. Empirically, the paper focuses on flood defence planning and implementation-related decisions as they still remain the dominant approach of managing flood risks in those locations. The findings from the two case studies show that involvement of local stakeholders in decisions related to flood defence schemes is limited and likely to lead to conflict and frustration as well as, potentially, a strengthening of inequalities. These lessons have implications for the United Kingdom and Germany as well as for other locations around the world.

The role of local stakeholder participation in flood defence decisions in the United Kingdom and Germany

An important aspect of integrated flood risk management around the world is accepted as being the involvement of a range of stakeholders in flood-related decision-making processes. Achieving local stakeholder participation in ways that lead to the expected benefits is burdened by challenges and difficulties. By drawing on examples of practices of local stakeholder participation in flood risk management in two European countries, the United Kingdom and Germany, this paper aims to understand the extent to which local stakeholders are able to influence flood risk management. Empirically, the paper focuses on flood defence planning and implementation-related decisions as they still remain the dominant approach of managing flood risks in those locations. The findings from the two case studies show that involvement of local stakeholders in decisions related to flood defence schemes is limited and likely to lead to conflict and frustration as well as, potentially, a strengthening of inequalities. These lessons have implications for the United Kingdom and Germany as well as for other locations around the world.