In the present article, practices of inclusion of different types of volunteers in the response to a large-scale forest fire in Sweden are studied. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with three types of voluntary actors. The volunteers were organized to different degrees, from members of organizations and participants in emergent groups to organizationally unaffiliated individuals. Organized volunteers were the most easily included, particularly if they were members of voluntary emergency organizations. It was difficult for volunteers lacking relevant organizational affiliation to be included. Disaster response operations are dynamic, conditions change over time, and tensions between different modes, degrees, and levels of inclusion may arise. However, irrespective of changing conditions, practices of inclusion of highly organized volunteers work best. © 2018 The Authors Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd

September 2015 saw a sharp increase in the influx of refugees in the Øresund region. In this study, resilience defined as flexible adaptation was taken as a baseline to guide interviews with societal infrastructure actors and NGOs engaged in managing the situation. Different actors had different organisational preconditions that influenced their ability to adapt to the new situation. Among the strongest drivers behind resilient performance were the organisation’s ways of relating to established rules, regulations, procedures and processes, the way relationships were formed between people and hierarchical layers within the organisations, and the perceived value of the human operator and the human contribution within the organisational whole. These values, in turn, determined how the organisations shaped many of the basic conditions that allowed resilient performance to develop. In the study it was found, for public actors in particular, that the criteria necessary to adapt to the situation were not met by organisational structures and processes.

Many countries have established disaster risk management (DRM) systems to reduce disaster risks and improve societal safety. Risk assessment in the DRM system is not only an important tool to identify potential risks, but also promotes DRM through conversations among stakeholders from different functional sectors and administrative levels. The municipal risk assessment, produced at the lowest administrative level of the system, is often expected to fulfill two purposes. One is to meet municipalities’ own, local DRM needs, while the other is to contribute to regional and national-level work. This article takes the multi-level, multi-stakeholder, bottom-up Swedish DRM system as a representative example to investigate the perceived challenges and opportunities emerging from the preparation of these dual-purpose assessments. Empirical data were collected through 42 semi-structured interviews and related documentation from 18 local municipalities and six regional authorities in Sweden. The findings, representing perceived challenges and opportunities were categorized into six themes: the focus of municipal RVA work; the template and evaluation criteria for municipal RVAs; municipal RVA work as a continuous process; the dissemination of municipal RVAs; feedback from the county administrative board; and the benefits and drawbacks of municipal RVA work.

To outline a framework for preparedness planning at the organizational level.The study is based on a content analysis of research literature as well as an analysis of interviews with six preparedness planners working in Swedish local authorities.The study setting included Swedish local authorities of different sizes.The participants are preparedness planners responsible for coordinating crisis management work in Swedish local authorities. The study includes preparedness planners with different backgrounds, education, experiences, and gender.A presentation of 19 factors of preparedness planning identified in the literature and a discussion around how preparedness planners perceive those factors.The main outcome measures are knowledge about how both researcher and practitioner understand and argue around different factors of preparedness planning.The result of this study is a framework for preparedness planning. As preparedness planning ought to be a learning process, the presented framework builds on four areas connected to learning: prerequisites for preparedness planning, who should be involved, what is to be learned, and how should the work be shaped.The analysis of factors identified in the literature and also in the interviews with preparedness planners illustrates that the four areas connected to learning are required for developing a preparedness planning process.

IMPROVER is a Horizon 2020 project focusing on how to improve European critical infrastructure resilience to crises and disasters through the implementation of resilience concepts to real life examples of pan-European significance, including cross-border examples.

The project will develop methodologies for the implementation of societal, organisational and technological resilience concepts to critical infrastructure. To this end, it requires several resilience-related concepts to be identified and defined.

This is the final version of the IMPROVER Lexicon of Definitions. It is the result of the international survey conducted by the project and it gathers several resilience concepts and their definitions, as well as other key related terms from all the current, completed deliverables in the project.

In this final version of the document, we offer a list of terms and their definitions which will reflect the assumptions of the proposed IMPROVER methodology and will be used by the project partners for the duration of the project. This lexicon will also serve as a recommendation for terminology towards the project partners, the associated partners, the collaborating projects and the CIP community in general.

Risk and vulnerability analysis is a tool that is used to prevent and prepare our society for crises. Today Swedish municipalities are required to perform such an analysis as part of their crisis management work. Although these analyses are described as important for crisis management, there are not many studies that indicate how it is important.The purpose of this report is to describe municipal risk and vulnerability analysis and how the results of the work is utilized. The goals are to contribute to the development of the Swedish crisis management system and provide feedback to the municipalities and county councils interviewed in this study.The results show that today the focus is on risk and vulnerability analysis and the methods for performing them, and not on how they is used in society. In the effort to further develop risk and vulnerability analysis (and crisis management work) there is a need to analyze the methods that lead to positive development and those that need to change. We must dare to ask an unpleasant question about whether there is value to working the way we do today, or whether we should try something new that perhaps is better suited for analyzing our complex social system.Key words: Risk and vulnerability analysis, municipality, crisis management, preparednessNyckelord: Risk- och sårbarhetsanalys, kommun, krishantering, förberedelser

Disasters such as the storms that affected Sweden in 2005 and 2007 showed that citizens initially conducted a large part of the disaster response, such as clearing roads, giving psychosocial support to affected neighbours and repairing power lines in collaboration with power companies. As a result of these storms, an Emergent Citizen Group (ECG) was established in a village which continued to work on risk prevention, even after the event. The aim of this paper is to describe and analyse this local emergent citizen group’s continuing work on the prevention of local risk and vulnerability, and particularly, their work on flood prevention. The results indicate that authorities seldom understand the ECG’s concerns about risks. Authorities also lack the experience and capacity to collaborate with, and support, the ECG’s risk and vulnerability reduction work. Bureaucratic barriers and declining motivation among volunteers within the ECGs could undermine commitment to the prevention of risks.