Building City Resilience through Collaboration.

Abstract

Nowadays, the majority of the world’s population lives in cities and, according to projections, this number will increase over the coming decades. Accelerated globalization has dramatically increased the complexity and perceived unpredictability of threats and hazards. As cities continue to grow and grapple with uncertainties, cities across the world face an increasing variety of challenges ranging from short-term disasters such as floods, droughts, and earthquakes, to long-term disasters such as climate change. In most cities, the approach to managing disasters has limited to top-down initiatives directed by disjointed departments and entities of the local government who adopted a reactive response to disasters. In this context, city stakeholders such as volunteer organizations, citizens, media, academic, educational and scientific entities, and private and public companies were informed without becoming actively involved in the resilience-building process. The capacity of a city to adapt to disasters requires a resilience approach that not only takes into consideration the contribution of each stakeholder independently but also tackles the functioning of a city in a comprehensive and holistic manner. The approach to building resilience focuses on the innate strengths of city stakeholders and the need to collaborate to maximize efforts and existing resources. Building city resilience therefore, requires analyzing the needs of the different city stakeholders and empowering them to take actions. Currently, however, frameworks that help governments to improve collaboration with city stakeholders in the resilience-building process remain undeveloped. Therefore, frameworks that help local governments to understand and assess how to engage stakeholders at the most appropriate time and in a manner that contributes to the resilience-building process need to be developed. The contribution of this research is the development of a stakeholder-collaboration maturity model. The stakeholder-collaboration maturity model defines five sequential maturity stages to help local governments to improve progressively the collaboration with city stakeholders in the resilience-building process. Each maturity stage indicates the stakeholders that need to be involved, the policies that need to be implemented, and the indicators that evaluate the implementation of the policies. The stakeholder-collaboration maturity model was developed as a result of an iterative process that included semi-structured interviews with representatives from six different cities committed to improving their level of city resilience. Furthermore, two case studies were carried out in two cities in order to implement the stakeholder-collaboration maturity model. These case studies aimed at gathering evidence of the evolution of the collaboration between the local government and city stakeholders and to validate the sequence of stages and policies presented in the maturity model. Moreover, the stakeholder-collaboration maturity model made it possible to assess the current maturity stage of the cities under study and to provide recommendations for improving collaboration with different city stakeholders.