Exploring Stakeholder Views on Disaster Resilience Practices of Residential Communities in South Florida

Abstract

Disaster resilience is a shared responsibility among all stakeholders. There is sorely a need to engage multiple stakeholders in collaboratively creating and facilitating the disaster resilience of residential communities. However, different stakeholders could have different priorities and make different decisions on implementing the resilience practices; such differences are affected by stakeholder views on the importance and current implementation conditions of the resilience practices. Without identifying and integrating multistakeholder views, disaster resilience decisions could become ineffective, time-consuming, costly, and conflict-prone. To address the gap, this paper focuses on identifying the disaster resilience practices in residential communities and analyzing stakeholder views on the importance and implementation of these practices in South Florida. The disaster resilience practices are identified from (1) the domain literature, (2) documents on resilient community planning, and (3) systematic interactions with stakeholders through in-depth surveys and interviews. The paper discusses the survey design, implementation, and results. Overall, the results show that, on average, the identified resilience practices are highly important, and they are moderately implemented. The results also show that, for a considerable number of resilience practices, there is a significant difference in the ranks of importance and implementation of these practices between different stakeholders. In addition, stakeholder views on the importance and implementation of the resilience practices are affected by factors such as stakeholders’ ages, regions, types of dwellings in which they live, and the occurrence of the disaster. This research contributes to the body of knowledge by providing both theoretical and empirical knowledge on the importance and implementation of community disaster resilience practices from the stakeholders’ perspectives; it could improve human-centered decision-making by integrating multistakeholder views into community resilience planning toward more robust, adaptive, and recoverable residential communities.