Transformations in European Natural Hazards Risk Management: There and Back Again

In this chapter, Timothy Prior, Michel Herzog and Florian Roth scrutinize the concept of resilience that has risen to prominence in recent debates about transformations in civil security governance. Technical natural hazard management, the traditionally dominant mode of civil security governance, has been increasingly challenged by new approaches to handling hazards that emphasize decentralized, self-organizing structures for flexible responses to challenges posed by complexity and unpredictability. The concept of resilience has been at the centre of this transformative process. Adopting a broad historical perspective on the changing interaction between people and risk environments, the chapter illustrates how the means of dealing with hazards have been characterized by a gradual centralization, systematization and technocratization since the Middle Ages before more recent experiences facilitated a partial return to rather decentralized and people-centred approaches that build upon long-standing local knowledge to deal with hazards in context- and circumstance-specific ways. This also signals a potential redistribution in the roles citizens and states. Prior, Herzog and Roth show that resilience is gaining traction in natural hazards discourse and practice, but also acknowledge that this transformation needs to deal with crucial challenges and ambivalences.