Institutional response to disaster risk: the City of Vancouver and District of Maple Ridge, British Columbia, Canada

Abstract

Proactively managing disaster risk in the absence of an event is the result of the responsible organization or institution’s political will. This paper is a comparative policy and practice study on factors affecting municipal institutional behaviour on flood management in the City of Vancouver and District of Maple Ridge, British Columbia. Using Q methodology, we identify three behavioural groups through a by-person factor analysis on local practitioners (n = 12) in the study area. We compare these findings with data gathered from semi-structure in-depth interviews (n = 7), literature on development pathway theory and a review of local responses in the two cities. We suggest the mechanisms in place for external funding is inherently different for smaller municipalities who lack administrative capacities. In the absence of cross-boundary risk, it becomes more difficult to access the resources necessary to adopt disaster risk reduction strategies requiring large inputs of hard infrastructure. These smaller municipalities are more reliant on the expressed interests of the public than that of larger municipalities who can more freely distribute resources based on risk. Not only does institutional behaviour influence the disaster risk management system in place, but also the external mechanisms in place to provide support for such proactive management forces institutional behaviour of smaller municipalities to be oriented towards more social inclusion as opposed to the risk-sensitive approach that larger municipalities are more easily able to align themselves. This hinders the adoption of disaster risk reduction in local emergency management policy and practice and reinforces a reactive disaster risk management.