Disaster Resilience: How different stakeholders frame resilience and how useful is the concept for policy and practice

Resilience is not a new concept for Disaster Risk Management (DRM) practitioners and researchers, but only in the last decade has it been strongly introduced into the policy arena. However, there is no single, agreed definition of disaster resilience with the idea being highly contested. As in other fields, in DRM more efforts are needed to investigate whether and how resilience could be a useful framework for policies and practices, and also to explore how decision makers are attempting to incorporate resilience ideas into their work. The aims of this paper are to understand how different stakeholders and decision makers frame Disaster Resilience and the associated ideas, and also how they are attempting to incorporate these ideas into practice.

This paper will present the results of ongoing research into institutional arrangements that explicitly incorporate the term and ideas of resilience. The research strategy is a single indepth case study that allows detailed and intensive analysis of the policy and practice associated with a specific government program, and to capture the understanding of different stakeholders in a specific context. The case study is the Natural Disaster Resilience Program (NDRP) at the state and local level in Queensland, Australia. The analytical framework is Frame Analysis and the methods used are hermeneutical and dialectical, which include document revision, in-depth interviews, observation and questionnaires. In understanding how stakeholders frame resilience, special attention has been paid to aspects of learning, stakeholder engagement and uncertainty that is inherently involved in climate change hazards.