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While social vulnerability in the face of disasters has received increasing academic attention, relatively little is known about the extent to which that knowledge is reflected in practice by institutions involved in disaster management. This study charts the practitioners' approaches to disaster vulnerability in eight European countries: Belgium; Estonia; Finland; Germany; Hungary; Italy; Norway; and Sweden. It draws on a comparative document analysis and 95 interviews with disaster managers and reveals significant differences across countries in terms of the ontology of vulnerability, its sources, reduction strategies, and the allocation of related duties. To advance the debate and provide conceptual clarity, we put forward a heuristic model to facilitate different understandings of vulnerability along the dimensions of human agency and technological structures as well as social support through private relations and state actors. This could guide risk analysis of and planning for major hazards and could be adapted further to particular types of disasters.

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This article conceptualizes resilience as an emergent and contingent practice that shapes societal relationships in unexpected ways. It focuses on the case of the 2013 floods in Dresden, a city that witnessed three major floods within 11 years. Emergent volunteer activities on the ground and on social media played a significant role during the flood emergency response efforts. Drawing on Philippe Bourbeau’s definition of resilience as a process of patterned adjustment, the article regards these emergent structures as incidents of resilience. In the case of Dresden, not only was resilience not explicitly requested by the state, but it was in several incidents actively not wanted. While most of the volunteering activities arising from social media platforms intended to support the disaster management authorities, the case shows how subversive forms of resilience were mobilized to resist official plans. They finally urged authorities to adapt to a new social and technological reality in order to render unaffiliated volunteering governable. Resilience thus emerges as an adaptive process that shapes and is shaped by societal relations. The article thus seeks to add another facet to the debate on resilience by demonstrating how resilience helps us to make sense of complex and interdependent adaptation processes.