Multiple resilience dividends at the community level: A comparative study on disaster risk reduction interventions in different countries

The costs of disasters have been increasing in many parts of the world as a result of an increase in exposed and vulnerable assets as well as the effects of climate change. However, investments in disaster risk reduction (DRR)remain insufficient to manage these growing risks. To make investments in DRR more attractive and to shift investments from post-event response and recovery to pre-event resilience, there has been a push to account for the full range of benefits of those investments including economic, ecological and social ‘resilience dividends’. While the concept of ‘multiple resilience dividends’ is now frequently used to strengthen the DRR narrative, it has not yet been widely applied in practice when appraising DRR interventions. The paper analyses the knowledge gaps and challenges that arise from applying the ‘multiple resilience dividends’ in planning, implementation and evaluation of disaster risk reduction interventions on the community level. A newly developed framework is used to analyse empirical survey data on community level DRR interventions as well as five in-depth community case studies in Vietnam, Nepal, Indonesia, Afghanistan and the UK. The analysis reveals a disconnect between the available planning tools and the evidence on materialized multiple resilience dividends, which pose a key obstacle in successfully applying the concept on the community level. The paper concludes that a structured consideration of multiple dividends of resilience from the planning to the monitoring stage is important to secure local buy-in and to ensure that the full range of benefits can materialize.