Category: Worth A Look

Forthcoming 14 May 2014. Resilience has become a central concept in government policy understandings over the last decade. In our complex, global and interconnected world, resilience appears to be the policy ‘buzzword’ of choice, alleged to be the solution to a wide and ever-growing range of policy issues. This book analyses the key aspects of resilience-thinking and highlights how resilience impacts upon traditional conceptions of governance. This concise and accessible book investigates how resilience-thinking adds new insights into how politics (both domestically and internationally) is understood to work and how problems are perceived and addressed; from educational training in schools to global ethics and from responses to shock events and natural disasters to long-term international policies to promote peace and development. This book also raises searching questions about how resilience-thinking influences the types of knowledge and understanding we value and challenges traditional conceptions of social and political processes.

2013 Diploma Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject Politics – International Politics – Environmental Policy, grade: 1,3, University of Potsdam (Chair of International Poilitics), language: English, abstract: The prospects that global climate change will have adverse effects on human societies opened up a discourse about how adaptation should be managed. In order to finance adap-tation measures, the parties of the Kyoto Protocol recently established the Adaptation Fund in 2007. In view of the limited resources that are available for adaptation, scales for the prioritization of countries according to their suspected vulnerability have been developed in the literature. Indicators of vulnerability highlighted within this literature, only reflect the indicators of human development and therefore fail to capture the complex structures of vulnerability. The collective learning approach assumes that vulnerability can be significantly decreased when governance systems adapt to external changes through collective learning processes. The present thesis connects to this notion and therefore assesses the influence of collective learning processes on the vulnerability of the Bangladeshi and Pakistani society towards flood hazards. It does so in order to find a determinant of vulnerability that is able to capture its complexity. Following a case study comparison that is based on a systematic research on primary and secondary literature this study reconfirms that vulnerability can substantially be decreased in the presence of collective learning processes.

Continue reading “Worth a Look: Books on Governance & Resilience”