P21 Natural Hazard Risk Reduction as a Public Management Challenge

Panel Chairs

Corresponding and Review group chair Co-Chair

• Jana Blahak, University of Oslo. jana.blahak@stv.uio.no
• Wolfgang Seibel, Hertie School. wolfgang.seibel@uni-konstanz.de

Panel Topic Description

While the necessity of climate change adaptation is generally undisputed in the scholarly world, relevant research still predominantly focuses on regulatory and public policy issues rather than implementation and public management. In reality, however, reducing the risk of extreme weather events such as wildfires and floods puts increasing pressure on government agencies at various levels, for example in terms of coordinating across jurisdictions and conflicts over who bears the costs and reaps the benefits. Especially its political and redistributive consequences makes disaster risk reduction a managerial challenge rather than a technical one. Research focusing on the multidimensional nature of risk reduction, and how to manage the related public management challenges, is still in its emerging stages and rarely finds appropriate forums (Olson et al. 2020).

This panel discusses the different public management challenges connected to natural disaster risk reduction. The aim is to bring together research projects and preliminary or final results, which are currently scattered and have not yet formed a research community in their own right. This applies to research ranging from disaster anticipation (Freudenburg 1992) and prevention (McConnell & 't Hart, 2019) to infrastructure maintenance (Seibel 2022), and the evaluation of inappropriate governance or management failure (Kapucu & Boin 2017).

The most commonly discussed issue is the problem of coordinating across jurisdictions (see for example Blahak, 2026). Adaptation infrastructure involves high sunk costs, externalities and interdependencies between actors and territories. Another relevant example is the formation and management of productive or counter-productive stakeholder alliances, especially at the municipal administrative level. This may relate to the paradox of self-inflicted vulnerability when residents resist infrastructure improvements or the reduction of potential fuel for wildfires due to financial constraints or aesthetic concerns (Seibel et al. 2026). A related challenge is how local administrations balance the interests of the real estate and insurance sectors with risk mitigation in land use in relation to housing and residential developments (Vantaggiato et al. 2026; Lea & Pralle 2022). This may also give rise to social equity issues: insurance premiums may become unaffordable for middle-income homeowners, which in turn may incentivise the government and public agencies to refrain from increased land use for housing (Amorim-Maia et al. 2022). Relatively little is known about how public authorities actually handle these dilemmas in regulatory and administrative terms. Much of the literature, especially on the latter, is either normative or descriptive, while causal and analytical approaches are underrepresented. Ultimately, normative perspectives will serve no purpose unless they are connected to exemplary process analytics and real-world public management issues, such as coping with a multi-stakeholder environment. Accordingly, we are particularly interested in positive and negative cases of public policy implementation in natural hazard risk reduction, especially where stakeholder management has succeeded or failed. The panel invites evidence-based papers that examine these challenges and how public administration addresses them. While the primary focus is climate adaptation, we also welcome contributions from related fields that confront similar management issues, such as public health, critical infrastructure, and cybersecurity.

References

Amorim-Maia, A. T., Anguelovski, I., Chu, E., & Connolly, J. (2022). Intersectional climate justice: A conceptual pathway for bridging adaptation planning, transformative action, and social equity. Urban Climate, 41, 101053. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.uclim.2021.101053

Blahak, J. (2026). Necessary, Yet Overlooked: Land Use Control in La Plata Flood Risk Management. In W. Seibel, A. Butt, M. Buxton, & J. Blahak (Eds.), Natural Hazards and Public Management: Governing Climate Adaptation (pp. 145–179). Springer Nature Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-98257-6_5

Freudenburg, W. (1992). Nothing Recedes Like Success—Risk Analysis and the Organizational Amplification of Risks. RISK: Health, Safety & Environment, 3(1). https://scholars.unh.edu/risk/vol3/iss1/3

Kapucu, M., & Boin, A. (2017). Disaster and Crisis Management: Public Management Perspectives. Routledge.

Lea, D., & Pralle, S. (2022). To appeal and amend: Changes to recently updated Flood Insurance Rate Maps. Risk, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy, 13(1), 28–47. https://doi.org/10.1002/rhc3.12222

McConnell, A., & ‘t Hart, P. (2019). Inaction and public policy: Understanding why policymakers ‘do nothing.’ Policy Sciences, 52(4), 645–661. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-019-09362-2

Olson, R. S., Emel Ganapati, N., Gawronski, V. T., Olson, R. A., Salna, E., & Pablo Sarmiento, J. (2020). From Disaster Risk Reduction to Policy Studies: Bridging Research Communities. Natural Hazards Review, 21(2), 04020014. https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)NH.1527-6996.0000365

Seibel, W. (2022). Collapsing Structures and Public Mismanagement. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67818-0

Seibel, W., Butt, A., Buxton, M., & Blahak, J. (Eds.). (2026). Natural Hazards and Public Management: Governing Climate Adaptation. Springer Nature Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-98257-6

Vantaggiato, F., Lubell, M., Nowlin, M. C., Yusuf, J.-E. (Wie), & Shafiee-Jood, M. (2026). Sea-Level Rise Adaptation and Collaboration in Polycentric Governance: A Comparison of Three Regions. Public Administration Review, n/a(n/a). https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.70117

Relevance to Public Management Scholarship and/or Conference Theme

Public management scholarship has engaged extensively with crisis response, but far less with the administrative work of preventing foreseeable harm and ensuring safety. This panel addresses that gap. The argument is that the barrier to disaster risk reduction is not only absent knowledge, law, or capacity, but a set of management challenges that administrators cannot resolve through coordination alone: adaptation redistributes costs and benefits across identifiable winners and losers, and administrators must implement it while being exposed to the resulting conflicts.

This makes the panel directly relevant to the 2027 IRSPM theme. The panel asks the question of why administrations with capacity, evidence, and legal authority still fail to act even with, on the first glance, all necessary capacities to act appropriately. We locate the answer in the political and distributive environment of implementation rather than in administrative deficiency and thereby treat "building capacity to navigate uncertainty" not mainly as a resourcing problem but as a problem of governing conflict.

The panel does not theorise polycrisis at the systems level; it isolates the administrative mechanisms operating within a single risk domain and asks whether they recur elsewhere. It therefore complements rather than duplicates crisis-governance and resilience panels, supplying the micro and meso-level accounts those frameworks presuppose.

Substantively, the panel is intended to solicitate a set of papers on research currently scattered across disaster studies, urban planning, environmental governance, and public administration — a body of research that has not yet formed a community with shared vocabulary or cross-polination potential comparative ambition.