Addressing the balance between preventive and consequences-reducing measures regarding avoiding drifting into failure while increasing resilience in municipalities

Abstract

On New Year’s Day 2020, Stavanger Municipality incorporated Finnøy and Rennesøy municipalities. With this merger came additional challenges for the risk management of the municipality. A comprehensive risk and vulnerability assessment (CRVA) was conducted to obtain a more accurate risk picture for the newly merged municipality. This assessment is used as a data source for investigating the main topic of this thesis: “Addressing the balance between preventive and consequences-reducing measures regarding avoiding drifting into failure while increasing resilience in municipalities.” In addition to the Stavanger CRVA (2019b), supporting theories and concepts on risk governance, risk management, barrier management strategies, barrier balance, systems thinking, and drifting into failure are described to assist in investigating the main topic. A qualitative research study consisting of two parts is conducted. The first area of interest is the new measures proposed in the Stavanger CRVA (2019b), resulting from their gap analysis, as access to all existing measures is unavailable. The authors have classified these measures for their preventive and consequence-reducing qualities. In addition, the measures have been classified by barrier element type; organizational, operational, technical, and citizen action. These classification results represent the municipality's distribution of measures, departmental accountability, and critical societal functions. The second area is a document search to support this research, including Norwegian laws and regulations, national publications, Stavanger municipality meeting minutes, and budget reports relevant to the Stavanger CRVA (2019b). Results from the data and document search, combined with the theory and concepts, are used to investigate the main topic, and answer the four research questions posed in this thesis: 1. What is the current distribution between the proposed preventive and consequence-reducing measures in Stavanger Municipality? 2. Should the measures balance be different from today, and if so, why? 3. How can the measures balance be adjusted to provide a better fit for Stavanger Municipality? and 4. Is a holistic approach useful for adjusting the balance in complex organizations? It was identified that most of the proposed measures in the Stavanger CRVA (2019b) were preventive. These measures do not represent the overall distribution of measures in Stavanger municipality since an overview of existing measures was unavailable. There is also uncertainty surrounding the implementation of the proposed measures. Most of these measures are identified as organizational using the Barrier Memorandum by the Petroleum Safety Authority of Norway as a guide. While it is challenging to address barrier balance in Stavanger Municipality, for many reasons described in this thesis, relevant observations have been made on the relations between balance, barriers, resilience, systems thinking and drifting into failure. A key finding is that barrier management used in a municipal setting can increase focus on barrier element types, their interactions, and viewing the system holistically. Another key finding is that focusing on the emerging properties of barrier interaction can lead to drifting into failure, but this can be avoided through increased focus on developing resilience in the system