Local Disaster Management

Local Disaster Management explores what resilience means for local communities and local governments on the front line of responding to disasters and emergencies.

Disaster management is often seen as a major international issue undertaken by global actors such as the UN, Red Cross and Red Crescent. Yet fundamentally, all disasters are local. Every disaster, regardless of its type, affects individuals, families and communities before they escalate to encompassing one or many communities or nations. This volume therefore explores fundamental issues of disaster and emergency management at the local level. What is resilience? What does resilience mean for a local government seeking to lessen the impact of disasters on their community? How do local governments adapt through their experiences of disasters and how do they recover from catastrophic experiences? This book explores these issues with chapters from top scholars in the field, draws out lessons for local government officials and disaster managers seeking to build community resilience, prepare their communities for a changing environment, and facilitate recovery after disasters strike.

Local Disaster Management provides invaluable insight for local governments charged with managing the inescapable effects of climate change and the increasing frequency and severity of disasters, as well as for scholars of local governance, disaster resilience, government policy, and disaster management. The chapters were originally published as a special issue in Local Government Studies.

Local emergency management special issue: a foreword by Dr Barry Quirk CBE Introduction: Local emergency management special issue Gina Yannitell Reinhardt and Lex Drennan 1. The concept of resilience: a bibliometric analysis of the emergency and disaster management literature Fatih Demiroz and Thomas W. Haase 2. Resilience policy in practice – surveying the role of community-based organisations in local disaster management Lex Drennan and Lochlan Morrissey 3. Local politics in an international context: a linguistic analysis of community resiliency in Memphis, TN Leah Cathryn Windsor, Andrew J. Hampton, James Grayson Cupit and Alistair James Windsor 4. Residential taxable value recovery in coastal Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina Skip Krueger, Julie Winkler and Ronald L. Schumann 5. Using community education interventions to build resilience and avert crises: how accidental dwelling fires decreased in Essex County, UK Gina Yannitell Reinhardt and Kakia Chatsiou 6. Perceptions of disaster resilience in four Texas coastal communities Kirby Goidel, Jennifer A. Horney, Paul M. Kellstedt, Emily Sullivan and Stephanie E. V. Brown 7. Maintaining the status quo: understanding local use of resilience strategies to address earthquake risk in Oklahoma Ray HsienHo Chang, Alex Greer, Haley Murphy, Hao-Che (Tristan) Wu and Steven Melton

Gina Yannitell Reinhardt is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Essex, where she leads the ARISE Initiative to help local authorities evaluate resilience-building programmes and their impact, and researches resilience, foreign aid, climate change and environmental policy, and political trust.

Lex Drennan is an adjunct research fellow at the Policy Innovation Hub, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia, where she carries out research in the field of disaster resilience, government policy, and disaster management.