28. Profiling Risk Governance in Natural Hazards Contexts

Risks are always managed within a broader context of relationships between governments, citizens, civil society and business. The various elements of what has been termed ‘new governance’ include the emergence of multi-level structures and processes and the ‘hollowing out’ of the nation state; moves away from the exercise of centralised authority; the application of new forms of authority and control; and a changing distribution of responsibilities between the state and other actors. Whilst such governance characteristics can be discussed in sweeping terms, in practice there are considerable differences between countries and regions in the extent to which these trends of change have taken place. In this chapter we present a framework for profiling some of the key dimensions of natural hazard governance. The aim was to capture the variability and dynamism of governance practice through a simple structure that enables any chosen national, regional or local natural hazard governance context to be profiled against a set of eight governance characteristics.