3 - Governance Structures for Recovery and Resilience

Summary

Disaster governance is an emergent construct in disaster research. It refers to new sets of structural arrangements and processes involving coordinated decisionmaking and action involving multiple actors from government, private sector, and civil society. Disaster governance focuses on managing hazards by reducing exposure, vulnerabilities, and adverse consequences of disasters through improvements in local response capacities, resilience, and various types of assistance to affected communities post-event. The set of structural arrangements engages state actors, private sector actors such as businesses and multi-national corporations, social actors (non-governmental organizations, community-based organizations), and policy actors (advocacy groups, political actors) into an integrated network from local to global scales. The context within which disaster governance arrangements function is influenced by demographic changes, spatial and administrative scales (from local to national), and the phases of emergency management, that are in turn shaped by historical, economic, social, and political processes within and between places. Such contextual understanding explains why disaster governance often is reactive, fragmented, rarely risk-based, and lacks comprehensiveness. This chapter reviews the contextual changes and challenges affecting disaster governance in the United States from the perspective of disaster resilience and long-term recovery. It begins with a short discussion on the changing nature of disaster risk, followed by a section on the current realities of emergency management, the causes and consequences of the decline in federal capabilities, and ends with the challenges for disaster governance in 2021 and beyond.