Although increasing attention has been given to the need to engage local communities and facilitate community resilience, discrepancies between theory and practice remain evident. Myths, misconceptions and mistakes persist in post-disaster emergency operations, and in the reconstruction and re-development efforts following disaster. The 'command and control' approach typically deployed by disaster management agencies results in an increasing dependency on external support and annihilates the potentialities of local communities. Learning lessons from post-disaster interventions is important in order to better understand how to orient development interventions, especially those addressed to the sustainable development of vulnerable areas, such as mountain and rural territories. We emphasise the importance of recognizing community resilience and the capacity of local communities to self-organise.We describe examples of community resilience in action as it occurred following the earthquake in the Province of L'Aquila in the Abruzzo region of central Italy on 6 April 2009. We discuss the aftershock economies and aftershock societies that developed in the extraordinary communities that emerged around rural villages in the mountain areas around L'Aquila. A multi-methods approach was used, primarily drawing on personal experiences of life in the autonomous locally-organised camps that were established in rural areas following the earthquake. We conclude that the persistence of various disaster myths and the failure to acknowledge community resilience undermine more effective, sociallysustainable, disaster management and rural development planning. Learning from the post-disaster communities that arose in the L'Aquila post-earthquake mountain territory, we argue that in postdisaster management and in rural development planning, there should be a greater awareness of the underlying community resilience, and we suggest that greater attention should be given to understanding, recognizing and strengthening the capacities of local communities and the resilient social processes they put into action in order to address the negative social and economic impacts they experience during crises.

Crises and disasters are windows of opportunity to learn and transform toward enhancing disaster risk reduction (DRR) and resilience. However, a poor understanding of community resilience and the social dimensions of risk, the lack of a methodology to engage and empower resilience in society, and business-as-usual together limit the implementation of effective DRR and resilience-building strategies. In this reflection paper, we discuss the main elements of the DRR and resilience paradigm.By analyzing the failures in disaster management, we identified the cultural and political barriers to enhancing DRR and community resilience as being: a paternalistic social protection culture; and the command-and-control approach to knowledge and resources for risk reduction. We reflect on the implications of this for sustainable development and argue that building a glocal culture of community wellbeing and resilience and a socially sustainable risk governance is needed to overcome the cultural and political barriers to DRR and sustainable development.

This paper reflects on what materialised during recovery operations following the earthquake in L'Aquila, Italy, on 6 April 2009. Previous critiques have focused on the actions of the Government of Italy and the Department of Civil Protection (Protezione Civile), with little attention paid to the role of local authorities. This analysis sheds light on how the latter used emergency powers, the command‐and‐control approach, and top‐down planning to manage the disaster context, especially in terms of removal of rubble, implementing safety measures, and allocating temporary accommodation. It discusses how these arrangements constituted the mechanism via which ‘disaster capitalism’ took hold at the local and national level, and how it violated human rights, produced environmental and social impacts, hindered local communities from learning, transforming, and building resilience, and facilitated disaster capitalism and corruption. To make the disaster risk reduction and resilience paradigm more effective, a shift from centralised civil protection to decentralised, inclusive community empowerment systems is needed.

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), Commissioner Danuta Hübner and officials from DG REGIO, DG EMPL, SG and BEPA.• A "Hearing on cohesion policy and regional innovation" was prepared and steered by Luc Soete (UNU-MERIT, Maastricht) REGIO, in particular Peter Berkowitz, Nicola de Michelis, Mikel Landabaso, Nicholas Martyn and Frank Rawlinson, Katarina Mathernova, Veronica IV Valuable comments and contributions have been made by officials and experts of DG EXECUTIVE SUMMARYThere is a consensus that the European Union should modernise its budget, tackling the new challenges and breaking away from bureaucratic inertia and the juste retour logic that hitherto have prevented change. The decision to undertake a budget review has provided the opportunity for doing so. This opportunity is still available. Cohesion policy is part of the review, but there are conflicting views on its rationale, its results, and the need and scope for reform. The risk of wrong changes is high. The risk that no change will take place is also very high.The purpose of this Report is to help avert these risks by setting an agenda for reform and seeking to initiate a frank, informed and timely debate on conceptual, political and operational aspects. A start has been made with the consultation undertaken for preparing the Report. 1 On the basis of this consultation, and a review of the economic literature, empirical evidence and a comparative and historical perspective, the Report argues that:• there is a strong case, rooted in economic theory and in a political interpretation of the present state of the European Union, for the Union to allocate a large share of its budget to the provision of European public goods through a place-based development strategy aimed at both core economic and social objectives;• cohesion policy provides the appropriate basis for implementing this strategy, but a comprehensive reform is needed if present challenges are to be met;• the reform requires the adoption of a strong policy concept (renewing the original ideas of EU founding fathers), a concentration of priorities, key-changes of the governance, a new high-level political compromise and an appropriate adjustment of the negotiation process on the budget;• current economic and political events have increased the urgency for change: some of the reform proposals can and should be anticipated in the current programme period.The policy model is the starting point of any change. Indeed, as the Report argues, without such an initial discussion to establish a mutual understanding of the rationale of a place-based development policy, there can be no meaningful debate on reform. A place-based policy is a long-term strategy aimed at tackling persistent underutilisation of potential and reducing persistent social exclusion in specific places through external interventions and multilevel governance. It promotes the supply of integrated goods and services tailored to contexts, and it triggers institutional changes.In a place-based policy, public interventions rely on local knowledge and are verifiab...