Institutional resilience and disaster governance: How countries respond to Black Swan events

Abstract

In a worldwide hazard environment exacerbated by the effects of climate change and the increasing interconnectedness of built and social systems, disasters are becoming more frequent, more destructive, and locally more variegated. Yet some communities are more disaster resilient than others. What explains this? This study employs institutional resilience as a lens through which to compare the responses to large-scale disasters taken by Australia, Japan, and The Netherlands, three affluent democracies with distinctive institutional arrangements. In so doing, we use the Swan Matrix as a yardstick for gauging the adaptive capacity of different systems of disaster governance. By focusing on human efforts to build resilience, we draw attention to contextual factors, particularly the type of institutional arrangement, which, our observations suggest, shape disaster governance. We conclude with a call for further comparative research into the major disaster governance systems in a hazard environment in which large-scale disasters are becoming commonplace.