Managing Risk in Dynamic Conditions: Emerging Crises, Changing Technologies, and the Collective Capacity to Learn

Abstract

Governing unexpected, extreme events requires a fundamental change in the design of planning processes and responsibilities to enable communities to manage novel risks in sustainable ways. The challenge is to create continuous learning processes for communities that include participants at diverse levels of knowledge, skill, vulnerability, and commitment to reducing risk not only for themselves, but for the whole community. To investigate the problem of collective learning under stress, we analyzed processes of organizational learning in the operational context of Taiwan over a series of extreme events, 1999-2020. While collective learning did occur in Taiwan, it is not clear that sustainable management of novel risks has been achieved. Finding the balance between social coherence and system control likely needs to be recalibrated for each new event.

Research Trends in Resilience and Vulnerability Studies

“…Comfort and Wang [32] raise several examples of failures in responding to hazard events, exposing significant vulnerabilities in systems, and showing the importance of resilient infrastructures. In a Taiwanese case, the need for learning was coupled with a necessity to "recalibrate" and adjust to shifting contexts associated with the differences in future events [32] Information sharing about disasters is essential for learning to occur.…”

“…Comfort and Wang [32] raise several examples of failures in responding to hazard events, exposing significant vulnerabilities in systems, and showing the importance of resilient infrastructures. In a Taiwanese case, the need for learning was coupled with a necessity to "recalibrate" and adjust to shifting contexts associated with the differences in future events [32] Information sharing about disasters is essential for learning to occur. It has been reasoned that, with the growing consequence to situational mindfulness of geospatial data sources, the sharing of this information in effective, efficient ways is a primary goal for disaster risk reduction [33].…”