The Standardization Process as a Chance for Conceptual Refinement of a Disaster Risk Management Framework: The ARCH Project

Abstract

Risks related to climate change and natural hazards increasingly affect urban areas such as historic towns, old urban quarters, villages, and hamlets. These, as well as historic landscapes, make up a significant part of an urban area’s identity and cannot just be rebuilt or significantly changed without taking into account the historic value, cultural background, and prescribed regulations. Systematic resilience building for historic areas is becoming essential, and research supporting it will be in the spotlight. However, questions still exist concerning how to best transfer research results into practice at the community level. Standardization of resilience-enhancing methods and tools deriving from research projects is one option, chosen, e.g., for the EU-Horizon 2020 project ARCH. Within the project, a disaster risk management (DRM) framework has been composed and then transferred into a standard, supported by a co-creation approach involving relevant stakeholders. This article outlines the project’s different standardization steps and its impact on the development of the ARCH DRM Framework. It highlights the systematic inclusion of project-external stakeholders who actively contribute to the validation and enhancement of the ARCH DRM framework to guarantee maximum applicability in historic areas, supporting them in their fight against the impacts of climate change and natural hazards.

Increasing stakeholder engagement in research projects through standardization activities

“…They were selected based on their integration of standardization as integral project part in a separate task or work package, the number of CWAs they developed, the access of the research team to relevant data and the research team's interest in the research topics. Furthermore, SMR and ARCH were chosen as case-studies as these were the only projects of this research that established or implemented a 5-step standardization approach on integrating standardization and aligned standardization with the projects' co-creation activities, thus integrating standardization more systematically and in depth in the project activities (Lindner et al, 2021b). The number of partners in these research projects varies a lot-while SMR and ARCH respectively have 12 and 15 partners, Smarter Together and DRIVER þ respectively have 29 and 30 organizations in their projects.…”

“…Takagi and Varajao, 2022), even though these standards themselves give limited consideration to the issue of project stakeholder management (Eskerod and Huemann, 2013). Further literature, for example, describes the relevance of standards as a knowledge and technology transfer instrument in biotechnology research (Lorenz et al, 2019) or how standardization in general is integrated in European funded research projects such as on city resilience (Lindner et al, 2021b). As outlined above, especially for complex topics such as smart cities and resilience, the success of projects depends to a large extent on interaction with the stakeholders concerned.…”

“…They used the above-mentioned 5-step standardization approach established in SMR and already partly validated in ARCH. It includes an analysis of relevant standards, a comparison of end-user needs with these standards to identify standardization potentials, the definition of a project standardization strategy, the initiation of standardization activities and the dissemination and exploitation of the standardization activities (Lindner et al, 2021b). It is also possible that the smaller number of project partners in ARCH and SMR facilitated the coordination of the standardization activities with other project activities such as co-creation.…”

“…The project consisted of four project internal cities and several research organizations as well as a city network, which supported co-creating the project tools. Furthermore, another 12 cities were engaged in a mutual learning approach to foster the exchange of knowledge and good practices among the participating cities as well as to test and apply the resilience tools in these cities (Lindner et al, 2021b). Similar to the SMR project, the CEN Workshop should be conducted in line with these co-creation activities and thus to provide the possibility to involve Engaging stakeholders by developing standards further stakeholders to enhance and validate the ARCH DRM/CCA framework.…”

Using Organigraphs to Map Disaster Risk Management Governance in the Field of Cultural Heritage

“…Notably, this shift explicitly recognises the importance and role of CH in DRM. It attempts to reduce overall disaster risk to those CH sites [12], in which contemporary scholars are exploring the integration of CH into the broader concept of DRM both conceptually [15] and practically [16,17].…”