A framework for public private people partnership in the city resilience building process

Citizens in developed countries are increasingly aware of the fact that the entire responsibility of preventing, responding to and recovering from crises cannot fully fall on public entities and private companies. In fact, the role of the citizenry is increasingly powerful, and citizens are required to prepare for, respond to and recover from crises in the most effective manner. To that end, there is an emerging need to involve not only public entities and private companies but also citizens in the process of building a city’s resilience in order to understand the different perspectives on the same reality. Fostering the participation of citizens in the city’s resilience building process will also help to increase their awareness and commitment level in resilience related issues, eventually increasing the overall resilience level of the city. The aim of this research is to develop a framework that supports and guides the development process of public-private-people partnerships (4Ps) in the context of the city resilience-building process. The presented framework was developed as a result of an iterative process including a literature review, semi-structured interviews with representatives from six European cities that are currently investing resources to improve their cities’ resilience level among other methodologies. Moreover, the final version of the 4P framework was obtained after conducting a Delphi study. Finally, the 4P framework was validated conducting two case studies one in the city of Wellington, New Zealand and the other in San Sebastian, Spain. The framework is formed by three different components. A set of sixteen characteristics of effective 4Ps that have been classified into three dimensions, namely, stakeholder relationship, information flow and conflict resolution. Moreover, the framework describes three 4P evolution stages that describe the evolution of multi-stakeholder collaborations in order to achieve meaningful and long lasting 4Ps that provide support to any city’s resilience building process. Finally, the framework includes an implementation order that considering the 4P evolution stages establishes a priority order in the implementation of the characteristics what enables to ensure that available resources are invested in the most effective manner.Los ciudadanos de países desarrollados son cada vez más conscientes de que toda la responsabilidad de la prevenir, responder y recuperarse de las crisis no puede recaer en manos de entidades públicas y compañías privadas. De hecho, el rol de la ciudadanía es cada vez más importante y los ciudadanos son cada vez más imprescindibles a la hora de prepararse, responder y recuperarse de las crisis de la manera más efectiva posible. Es por eso que existe la necesidad de involucrar no solo a entidades públicas y compañías privadas, sino también fomentar la participación de las personas en el proceso de creación de resiliencia en ciudades para ser capaces de entender todas las diferentes perspectivas de una misma realidad. Incentivar la participación ciudadana en el proceso de creación de resiliencia en ciudades también ayuda a incrementar el nivel de concienciación y compromiso en temas relacionados con la resiliencia, haciendo que finalmente el nivel de resiliencia de la ciudad aumente. El objetivo de esta investigación es desarrollar un marco que apoye y guíe el proceso de desarrollo de colaboraciones público privada y de personas (4Ps) en el contexto de la creación de resiliencia en ciudades. El marco que se presenta ha sido desarrollado tras llevar a cabo un proceso iterativo que incluye, entre otras metodologías, una revisión bibliográfica, entrevistas semi-estructuradas con representantes de seis ciudades europeas que actualmente están invirtiendo recursos en aumentar su nivel de resiliencia. Además, se ha llevado a cabo un proceso Delphi para obtener la versión final del marco 4P. Finalmente, se llevaron a cabo dos casos de estudio, uno en Wellington (Nueva Zelanda) y otro en San Sebastian (España) para validar el marco 4P. El marco está compuesto por tres componentes. Una lista de 16 características de 4Ps efectivas que han sido clasificadas en tres dimensiones; relación entre agentes, flujo de información y resolución de conflictos. Además, el marco describe tres estados de evolución 4P que explican el proceso de transformación que experimentan las colaboraciones entre agentes hasta conseguir 4Ps relevantes, que perduren en el tiempo y que apoyen el proceso de creación de resiliencia en ciudades. Finalmente, el marco incluye un orden de implementación que establece un orden de prioridad para implementar de características considerando las peculiaridades de los estados de evolución 4P y de esta manera asegurar que los recursos disponibles para desarrollar estas colaboraciones se utilizan de la manera más efectiva

Resilience Framework for Critical Infrastructres

The welfare of society has increased significantly in the last few decades throughout the world due to advances in many sectors such as technology, health, communication, etc. But at the same time, this has also increased our dependency towards the correct functioning of these Critical Infrastructures (CIs). Therefore, a proper functioning and a high service reliability level of CIs are vital for the society’s welfare. In light of this situation, it is paramount to improve the resilience level of the CIs in order to prevent crises occurrence and absorb the impact when they occur. Resilience is defined as a capacity of a system to prevent a crisis occurrence, and in case it occurs, the capacity to absorb the magnitude of the impact and recover efficiently to the normal situation. Literature presents several definitions and perspectives regarding the resilience concept. However, it lacks to provide a detailed prescription about how crisis managers can improve their CI’s resilience level holistically. This research presents a framework that would help crisis managers to improve the resilience level of CIs. This framework provides a list of policies and sub-policies that crisis managers should implement in their CIs to enhance the resilience level. These policies have beendefined holistically taking into account internal and external stakeholders taking part in a major industrial accident as well as covering the four dimensions of resilience already defined in the literature. Furthermore, the influence of each resilience policy on the three resilience lifecycle stages has been determined. The main conclusion obtained from this analysis is that internal policies are the ones which most influence during the prevention stage whereas both internal and external policies assist on the absorption and recovery stages. An implementation methodology has also been defined in order to efficiently implement this framework in practice. It is difficult to implement all the policies at the same time. Furthermore, some policies require others prior implementation to achieve higher efficiency in their implementation. Therefore, this implementation methodology provides the temporal order in which the policies and sub-policies should be implemented in order to achieve a high resilience level. In order to carry out this research different kinds of research methods have been employed. Some methods aim to gather experts’ knowledge through workshops and questionnaires such as Group Model Building, Delphi, and Survey methods. Others, on the other hand, are based on analysis of past major industrial accidents or real cases such as case studies in CIs. From this variety of methods valuable and complementary information was gathered in order to develop and validate the resilience framework for CIs

EMM Model. Environmental Management Maturity Model for Industrial Companies

Environmental management has become an important issue within companies. Despite being a lot of environmental tools that companies may use, there is not a model that guides them towards environmental excellence and makes them see which tool they should use according to their maturity stage. This research hypothesizes that successful corporate environmental management evolves through a series of characteristic stages; independent of industrial context. The research literature in this type of models is scarce, without going into a deep analysis of how environmental management evolves within industrial companies, and hence, not being helpful within companies. As a consequence, the main objective of this research is to define an evolutionary environmental management maturity model. For the development of this model an iterative process has been followed, starting with some semistructured interviews among 19 companies within the Basque Country and two day workshops with environmental experts. As a result of these methods, the first version of the EMM (Environmental Management Maturity) Model has been developed. This version has been improved with the results obtained from a survey carried out within Spanish and Italian companies, leading to the second version of the model. Afterwards the development process was moved to the UK, obtaining some important information through a survey and semi-structured interviews. The third and final version of the EMM Model was completed. The EMM Model proposes six maturity stages: Legal Requirements, Responsibility Assignment and Training, Systematization, ECO2, Eco-Innovative Products and Services and Leading Green Company. For each maturity stage a description, the people involved, the different policies, indicators, Causal Loop Diagrams and Behavior Over Time graphs have been defined. It can be concluded that the maturity stages and consequently the different parts of each of the stages in this research can provide valuable guidance for industrial firms aiming to make progress in environmental matters, as the EMM Model helps them to identify in which maturity stage they are and sets out steps that they can take to move forward

Resilience Framework for Critical Infrastructres

The welfare of society has increased significantly in the last few decades throughout the world due to advances in many sectors such as technology, health, communication, etc. But at the same time, this has also increased our dependency towards the correct functioning of these Critical Infrastructures (CIs). Therefore, a proper functioning and a high service reliability level of CIs are vital for the society’s welfare. In light of this situation, it is paramount to improve the resilience level of the CIs in order to prevent crises occurrence and absorb the impact when they occur. Resilience is defined as a capacity of a system to prevent a crisis occurrence, and in case it occurs, the capacity to absorb the magnitude of the impact and recover efficiently to the normal situation. Literature presents several definitions and perspectives regarding the resilience concept. However, it lacks to provide a detailed prescription about how crisis managers can improve their CI’s resilience level holistically. This research presents a framework that would help crisis managers to improve the resilience level of CIs. This framework provides a list of policies and sub-policies that crisis managers should implement in their CIs to enhance the resilience level. These policies have beendefined holistically taking into account internal and external stakeholders taking part in a major industrial accident as well as covering the four dimensions of resilience already defined in the literature. Furthermore, the influence of each resilience policy on the three resilience lifecycle stages has been determined. The main conclusion obtained from this analysis is that internal policies are the ones which most influence during the prevention stage whereas both internal and external policies assist on the absorption and recovery stages. An implementation methodology has also been defined in order to efficiently implement this framework in practice. It is difficult to implement all the policies at the same time. Furthermore, some policies require others prior implementation to achieve higher efficiency in their implementation. Therefore, this implementation methodology provides the temporal order in which the policies and sub-policies should be implemented in order to achieve a high resilience level. In order to carry out this research different kinds of research methods have been employed. Some methods aim to gather experts’ knowledge through workshops and questionnaires such as Group Model Building, Delphi, and Survey methods. Others, on the other hand, are based on analysis of past major industrial accidents or real cases such as case studies in CIs. From this variety of methods valuable and complementary information was gathered in order to develop and validate the resilience framework for CIs