Built-in resilience through disaster risk reduction: Operational issues

It has been argued that the broad range of people responsible for the delivery, operation and maintenance of the built environment need to become more proactively involved in making the built environment resilient to a wide range of known and unforeseen hazards and threats. Accordingly, the (actual and potential) roles of a wide range of stakeholders associated with the integration of disaster risk reduction into the (re-)development of the built environment are examined. A review of literature, government data and interviews with key stakeholders in England highlights that despite regulatory intentions to increase local resilience through the use of public and private sector stakeholders, a number of structural and operational obstacles exist. A range of strategies can be employed to overcome these obstacles: revisions to building codes, tightening planning policy, improving professional training, clarifying roles and missions, enabling complementary bottom-up and top-down approaches, and the provision of good-practice guidance about the broad range of structural and non-structural risk reduction measures. Many of the operational challenges are non-structural and require a coherent, overarching strategy: changing and aligning the social understandings and practices in civil society, government and built environment stakeholders.