ADVANCING UNDERSTANDING ABOUT SPATIOTEMPORAL CONSIDERATIONS IN DISASTER RISK REDUCTION

Abstract

Climate change is altering the environments and conditions under which disaster risk emerges, accumulates, and is managed. This dissertation focuses on natural hazard-related disasters in particular. Because disaster risk is shaped by social, environmental, and spatiotemporal dimensions, this dissertation examines disaster how these dimensions influence disaster risk understanding and governance. This provides avenues for the inclusion of local knowledge as a source of evidence. The aim of this dissertation is to examine how local communities and local knowledge contribute disaster risk reduction (DRR). The first study uses co-interprets biophysical climate indicators with field-based risk ranking data and uses standardized z-scores to compare measured and perceived risk across selected risk items and study sites. The results support three findings. First, the biophysical analyses showed that the five sites did not share a uniform disaster risk context. Second, the perception analyses showed that respondents also differentiated certain risks spatially and temporally. Third, when the two evidence streams were co-interpreted, patterns emerge whereby some risk items in certain sites align between the risk assessment data and risk perception data, while others diverge. The second study uses a qualitative field-based design to explore soft infrastructure in Madagascar. It draws on focus group discussion data and analyzes transcripts using qualitative coding approaches. This study examines public perceptions of the roles and responsibilities of formal institutions, specifically the Government of Madagascar, and informal institutions, specifically the fokonolona, in disaster risk reduction and governance. The third study uses a Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA)-based systematic literature review and narrative synthesis to examine public-private partnerships (PPPs) in disaster risk reduction and disaster risk management. The review characterized the interdisciplinary PPP research and developed five thematic categories with implications for DRR. The thematic categories presented help advance current understanding of PPP design and implementation in DRR which in turn help identify challenges and opportunities for practical action. Across the three studies, local knowledge and data feature prominently. This dissertation helps affirm that DRR is more robust when local communities are incorporated as avenues for context-specific insights and integrated risk evidence.