• International collaboration for meeting the challenges of huge and cascading disasters, Aud Solveig Nilsen, Linda Marie Stakkeland
• Covid Response: evaluating political leadership in the MENA region, Ahmed Trabelssi
• Natech risk management in tailing dam, Fatma Lestari, Ridha Amini Insyania Saragih

Panel description

An emerging challenge to societal resilience is caused by cascading disasters, which are extreme events in which cascading effects increase in progression over time and generate unexpected secondary events of strong impact (Pescaroli, Alexander, 2015; Cutter, 2017). These disasters uniquely trigger social cascades that deeply affect the social fabric and interconnectedness of communities, organizations and institutions. The impacts of disasters, and in many cases their likelihood, are amplified by ongoing global trends, like rapid urbanization, intensified development in hazardous areas, increased population movements, climate change and strong reliance on technologies, among others. As climate change progresses, societies around the world will be forced to grapple with more frequent heat waves, the spread of infectious disease agents, land loss in coastal areas, and a host of other climate change-induced effects. What if the major earthquake that struck L’Aquila (IT) in 2009 would have happened in April 2020, during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, when the government issued a complete lockdown and the standard risk prevention measures (like gathering in safe areas) were neither applicable nor safe during the pandemic? How would emergency measures taken by the Italian government have impacted social cohesion, public trust and democratic legitimacy?

Cascading disasters can have severe and enduring repercussions on individuals, communities, and organizations, but also on national political institutions (by for example triggering illegitimate or ineffective modalities of emergency decision-making that in turn negatively impact societal resilience). The pressing question this panel aims to raise is the following: How to build effective and reliable organizations and institutions aimed at improving the adaptability and preparedness of citizens and societies to cascading disasters?

The COVID-19 pandemic has made clear how difficult it is to manage a complex system of interconnected and dynamic components (transportation, healthcare, economy, education), and how different countries are, in terms of risk perception, culture, attitudes, institutional and social trust, and socio-economic contexts. Cascading disasters require modular, flexible, and proactive responses from many interconnected actors, operating at different levels in different roles and embedded in different contexts. Effectively tackling this challenge requires to move from a reactive approach to risk management, based on predefined responses resulting from past events, to a proactive one based on the concepts of “living with uncertainty” and “envisioning the future”.

The panel's participants will engage with the topic of organizational and institutional preparedness for cascading disasters, and we welcome papers from different disciplines (sociology, political science, psychology, economics, public administration, history, philosophy) and perspectives that will discuss this issue. The panel welcomes diverse methodological approaches, including simulation, comparative or single case studies or experiments.