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Resilience is a ubiquitous term in disaster risk

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Disaster risk from extreme events and development are intimately linked. Disaster risk management influences and is affected by local development strategies. Trade-offs made in policy and implementation determine winners and losers on the basis of unequal capacity, susceptibility and hazard exposure. Transformation has been introduced as a concept opening new policy space for fundamental shifts in development trajectories. Though policy neutral, when combined with normative frameworks such as the Sustainable development goals it can open up leverage points for determining development trajectories. There is limited empirical evidence on which to base understanding of transformative disaster risk management policy though some work has been done in sister domains such as climate change mitigation and adaptation. This study asks whether transformation pathways for disaster risk management can be observed, offering an initial qualitative analysis to inform policy development. It is based on five case studies drawn from diverse locations exposed to a range of extreme events, examined through a conceptual framework offering five indicators of transformation to aid analysis: intense interaction between actors; the intervention of external actors; system level change extending beyond efficiency to governance and goals; behavior beyond established coping strategies; and behavior extending beyond established institutions. Core characteristics of transformative pathways for disaster risk reduction are identified, including pathway competition, pathway experimentation, pathway scale effects and pathway lock-in. These characteristics are seen to determine the extent to which the disruption consequent on extreme events leads to either transformatory change or relative stasis. The study concludes that transformative disaster risk management, both intentional and incidental can be observed. It is seen that transformations occur primarily at local level. Where policy level change occurs this generally played out at local level too. The particular insight of the study is to suggest that most often the burden of transformation is carried at the local level through the behavior of individuals, populations and civil society. This observation raises an important question for further work: How can the burden of undertaking transformation be shared across scales?

Despite growing interest in urban resilience, there is a significant gap between discourse and the capacity to develop resilience in practice. This scoping review assembles and shares evidence and insights from empirical studies of attempts to implement urban resilience published between 2005 and 2017. More precisely, it seeks to identify enabling strategies, impeding factors and trade-offs in the implementation of urban resilience. Findings are presented along the dimensions of urban resilience detailed in the City Resilience Framework (ARUP/Rockefeller Foundation): Health and Wellbeing, Economy and Society, Infrastructure and Environment, and Leadershipand Strategy (which we present as a cross-cutting theme). While some enabling and impeding factors in implementation are associated with a specific dimension, others are common to all three. Across dimensions, we find that transparent, inclusive and supportive governance reduces the risk of negative impact that resilience implementation will have on communities. Conflicting priorities of managing risk and meeting short-term needs are found to diminish the potential for transformative resilience action. Integrating risk into planning appears as a promising strategy in all dimensions of resilience. Trade-offs are found in resilience implementation, and range from adverse effects associated with infrastructure to power imbalances when the power to implement resilience privileges one system level over another. K E Y W O R D Senabling strategies, impeding factors, implementation, trade-offs, Urban resilience

Sareta Ashraph, LL.M. (Harvard) B.A. (Hons) (Oxford) is an international criminal barrister with particular expertise in gender and genocide. As Chief Legal Analyst of the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria (2012-2016), she drafted the June 2016 report which determined ISIL was committing the crime of genocide against the Yazidis. In 2019, she was UNITAD's Senior Analyst examining ISIL crimes in Iraq. She continues to work with Yazidi and other communities in northern Iraq seeking justice for ISIL crimes. Barzan Barzani Ph.D. (Symbiosis) is a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University, Faculty of Law and primarily responsible for conducting the field survey among Yazidi survivors in Iraq that is detailed in this article and its data analysis. David Matyas MPhil (Oxford) LLB/BCL (McGill) is a former aid worker and current legal articling student. This manuscript was written over the course of his studies at McGill University Faculty of Law. The views expressed herein are only those of the authors in their personal capacity.

Law is acknowledged as playing an important role in the growing field of disaster resilience. Still, a detailed inquiry into the possible relationships between law and disaster resilience remains largely absent from the discourse. This paper explores how legal thinking, approaches, and instruments can act as 'tools' in altering the nature and conditions of disaster risks. It looks at how state institutions can wield them and non-state actors employ them to participate in processes of change. Moving beyond a resilience literature that has tended to focus on law in terms of statutes, regulations, and human rights, this paper examines the ways in which legal reasoning, procedure, and substantive law can be instrumentalised to resist shocks, provoke incremental adjustments, or even foment transformational shifts in underlying risk conditions. It concludes by suggesting that law can offer both a breadth of insights for reconceptualising how power influences resilience and a number of instruments for challenging these power structures.

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