Governance of Disaster Risk

The course Disaster Risk Governance seeks to study disaster risk from the perspective of the paradoxes for its reduction in contemporary society. While we see how the economic costs of disasters are increasing in developing countries, the death toll in the developing countries does not diminish and the losses are critically challenging their social and economic development. While society has made great progress in disaster response this is not contributing to significantly advance in disaster risk reduction. However, new emerging paradigms are helping to better understand and tackle some of these challenges, such as a more comprehensive and integrative approach, and combining reactive and proactive policies, and structural and non-structural solutions. The understanding of governance of disaster risk as multihazard, cross-sectoral, multilevel, and participatory may help to envisage a mode of governance to better tackle the challenge of a risk society with increasingly reduced disaster risk and more equitable.