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There is increasing effort in science to support disaster risk management (DRM) and climate change adaptation in urban environments. It is now common for research calls and projects to reference coproduction methods and science uptake goals. This paper identifies lessons for researchers, research funders, and research users wishing to enable useful, useable, and used science based on the perspectives of research users in urban planning from low- and middle-income countries. DRM-supporting science is viewed by policy actors as: complicated and poorly communicated; presenting inadequate, partial, and outdated information; misaligned with policy cycles; and costly to access and inadequately positioned to overcome the policy barriers that hinder integration of DRM into urban planning. Addressing these specific concerns points to more systematic collection and organisation of data and enhancement of supporting administrative structures to facilitate better sight of human vulnerability and its link to development decision-making and wider processes of urban risk creation., (© 2024 The Author(s). Disasters published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of ODI.)

The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 and the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals call for action to build back better in ways that leave no one behind. At the same time, ensuring a local voice is increasingly central to humanitarian engagement. These aims contrast with limited analysis of how local actors might be supported in these respects during response and recovery, and how far recommendations are specific or generalisable across richer and poorer national contexts. The paper begins by comparing lessons learnt by survivors and community organisations in Sint Maarten, Dutch Caribbean, following a high-income state-led response to Hurricane Irma in 2017 with the priorities of lower income, humanitarian-led endeavours. The differences reveal the importance of economic resources as the basis for individual self-reliance and a fragmented civil society with limited leadership ambitions in Sint Maarten. Strong cross-cultural alignment nevertheless allows for a globally-relevant and yet contextually-sensitive framework for survivor-led action and reconstruction., (© 2019 The Authors Disasters © 2019 Overseas Development Institute.)

Resilience is a ubiquitous term in disaster risk management and is an increasingly prominent concept in early discussions focused on elaborating the post-2015 international policy landscape. Riddled with competing meanings and diverse policy implications, however, it is a concept caught between the abstract and operational. This paper provides a review of the rise to prominence of the concept of resilience and advances an elaboration of the related concepts of resistance, incremental adjustment and transformation. We argue that these concepts can contribute to decision-making by offering three distinct options for risk management policy. In order to deliberately and effectively choose among these options, we suggest that critical reflexivity is a prerequisite, necessitating improved decision-making capacity if varied perspectives (including those of the most vulnerable) are to be involved in the selection of the best approach to risk management., (© 2014 The Author(s). Disasters © Overseas Development Institute, 2014.)

This paper develops a framework based on procedural, methodological and ideological elements of participatory vulnerability and risk assessment tools for placing individual approaches within the wide range of work that claims a participatory, local or community orientation. In so doing it draws on relevant experience from other areas of development practice from which the disasters field can learn. Participatory disaster risk assessments are examined for their potential to be empowering, to generate knowledge, to be scaled up, to be a vehicle for negotiating local change and as part of multiple-methods approaches to disaster risk identification and reduction. The paper is a response to an international workshop on Community Risk Assessment organised by ProVention Consortium and the Disaster Mitigation for Sustainable Livelihoods Programme, University of Cape Town. The workshop brought together practitioners and academics to review the challenges and opportunities for participatory methodologies in the field of disaster risk reduction. In conclusion the contribution made by participatory methodologies to global disaster risk reduction assessment and policy is discussed.

Reducing losses to weather-related disasters, meeting the Millennium Development Goals and wider human development objectives, and implementing a successful response to climate change are aims that can only be accomplished if they are undertaken in an integrated manner. Currently, policy responses to address each of these independently may be redundant or, at worst, conflicting. We believe that this conflict can be attributed primarily to a lack of interaction and institutional overlap among the three communities of practice. Differences in language, method and political relevance may also contribute to the intellectual divide. Thus, this paper seeks to review the theoretical and policy linkages among disaster risk reduction, climate change and development. It finds that not only does action within one realm affect capacity for action in the others, but also that there is much that can be learnt and shared between realms in order to ensure a move towards a path of integrated and more sustainable development.