The Italian Response to the COVID-19 Crisis: Lessons Learned and Future Direction in Social Development:

Against the backdrop of a continuously changing situation, the aim of this paper is to discuss the impact of COVID-19 crisis in Italy, the government response to cope with the crisis and the major lessons learned during its management. The analysis shows how Italy's response has been characterised by some rapid measures to tackle the health crisis, but few plans in the mitigation stage and a lack of community involvement. This contribution stress the importance of a cultural shift, through the effort to apply in practice the principles already indicated in the main global policy frameworks to guide disaster management. A community social development approach can help to build concrete actions in this direction

Assessing the Impact of Household Participation on Satisfaction and Safe Design in Humanitarian Shelter Projects

Participation has long been considered important for post‐disaster recovery. Establishing what constitutes participation in post‐disaster shelter projects, however, has remained elusive, and the links between different types of participation and shelter programme outcomes are not well understood. Furthermore, recent case studies suggest that misguided participation strategies may be to blame for failures. This study analysed 19 shelter projects implemented in the Philippines following Typhoon Haiyan in November 2013 to identify the forms of participation employed. Using fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analysis, it assessed how household participation in the planning, design, and construction phases of shelter reconstruction led to outcomes of household satisfaction and safe shelter design. Participation was operationalised via eight central project tasks, revealing that the involvement of households in the early planning stages of projects and in construction activities were important for satisfaction and design outcomes, whereas engagement during the design phase of projects had little impact on the selected outcomes.National Science Foundation, United States Agency for International Development Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance, Nicolas R. and Nancy D. Petry Fellowship in Construction Engineering and Managemen

Drivers for coping with flood hazards: Beyond the analysis of single cases

Flood risks continue to pose serious threats to developing countries with dire ramifications for livelihoods. Yet, contemporary research on determinants for coping with flood hazards is driven mostly by individual cases with less effort to systematically identify coping strategies across multiple floods cases. This research analyses potential determinants of coping strategies to flooding across multiple floods using two case studies in Cameroon. Via empirical research, and qualitative/descriptive statistical analysis, the research investigated how human, social and economic/financial variables influence household coping decisions across the two flood sties. Results suggests a great influence of social and human capital on household decisions to adopt specific coping strategies, and that over 80% of flood victims in both study sites applied post-flood informal coping strategies. Analysis also shows significant inconsistencies with human capital variables, which reveal that coping determinants can be quite different even for floods occurring in the same agro-ecological zone. The findings also reveal that economic and financial capital has little influence on flood victims’ coping decisions, contrary to popular contentions in the literature. The results of this study have implications for research and policy implementation on flood-induced coping strategies in developing countries. Key words: coping strategies, determinants, flood hazards, multiple case

Following the footsteps: Urbanisation of Wa Municipality and its synergism in risk accumulation, uncertainties and complexities in urban Ghana.

Global demographic characteristics have witnessed a significant shift with more than half of the world's population crossing the rural-urban threshold in 2008. In Ghana, the 2010 census report revealed 50.9% urban population. While the many benefits of organised and efficient cities are well understood, it must be recognised that rapid, often unplanned urbanisation brings risk of profound social instability, risk to critical infrastructure, potential water crises and the potential for devastating spread of disease. These risks can only be further exacerbated as this unprecedented transition from rural to urban areas continues. This also means stakes are high for public and private interventions to ensure that urbanisation reinforces rather than retards prosperity. In spite of these past experiences, urban governance policies in emerging smaller cities are frequently ambivalent and piecemeal, exhibiting similar negative tendencies, a development that has received less academic attention. This study adopted multiple research techniques and the data were generated through a structured questionnaire survey, personal interviews and discussions. Based on our conviction that the development trajectory of any city hinges on the quality of its physical foundation, we seek to fill the knowledge gap using the Wa Municipality, the least urbanised but one of the fastest urbanising cities in Ghana today, as a case study. The results reveal emerging tendencies that indicate that Wa appears to be following in the footsteps of its predecessors - experiencing an inefficient potable water supply system and chronic sanitation situation, making diarrhoea one of many challenges for residents. It is ultimately suggested that a collaborative partnership with all key stakeholders is a better option to reap the potential for urbanisation to strengthen economic growth and development

Extreme multi-basin flooding linked with extra-tropical cyclones

© 2017 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd. Fluvial floods are typically investigated as 'events' at the single basin-scale, hence flood management authorities may underestimate the threat of flooding across multiple basins driven by large-scale and nearly concurrent atmospheric event(s). We pilot a national-scale statistical analysis of the spatio-temporal characteristics of extreme multi-basin flooding (MBF) episodes, using peak river flow data for 260 basins in Great Britain (1975-2014), a sentinel region for storms impacting northwest and central Europe. During the most widespread MBF episode, 108 basins (∼46% of the study area) recorded annual maximum (AMAX) discharge within a 16 day window. Such episodes are associated with persistent cyclonic and westerly atmospheric circulations, atmospheric rivers, and precipitation falling onto previously saturated ground, leading to hydrological response time

A conceptual governance framework for climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction integration

Climate change adaptation (CCA) and disaster risk reduction (DRR) have similar targets and goals in relation to climate change and related risks. The integration of CCA in core DRR operations is crucial to provide simultaneous benefits for social systems coping with challenges posed by climate extremes and climate change. Although state actors are generally responsible for governing a public issue such as CCA and DRR integration, the reform of top-down governing modes in neoliberal societies has enlarged the range of potential actors to include non state actors from economic and social communities. These new intervening actors require in-depth investigation. To achieve this goal, the article investigates the set of actors and their bridging arrangements that create and shape governance in CCA and DRR integration. The article conducts a comprehensive literature review in order to retrieve main actors and arrangements. The article summarizes actors and arrangements into a conceptual governance framework that can be used as a backdrop for future research on the topic. However, this framework has an explorative form, which must be refined according to site- and context-specific variables, norms, or networks. Accordingly, this article promotes an initial application of the framework to different contexts. Scholars may adopt the framework as a roadmap with which to corroborate the existence of a theoretical and empirical body of knowledge on governance of CCA and DRR integration