Risk and vulnerability assessments in a changing risk society – balancing anticipatory planning with adaptive capacity

The Covid-19 situation has questioned the ability of societies to handle contagious diseases.

Although much crisis preparedness work will now address pandemics, a resilient society must consider a wide range of potential threats.

An anticipatory approach is commonly adopted in preparing for crises, where potential events are analysed, and plans for how to respond to them are developed.

Swedish crisis management heavily relies on this approach, e.g. through the performance of Risk and Vulnerability Assessments (RVAs).

However, previous research has pointed out the fallacy of relying overly on anticipation, arguing that adaptive behaviour often is needed to manage (or avoid) incidents.

Since adaptations that lead to successful outcomes often go unnoticed, there is limited knowledge about what factors that enable adaptive behaviour. In this project, we intend to use the Covid-19 situation to study the role of adaptations in handling the pandemic.

More specifically, we aim to explore crisis management activities that were not part of pre-established planning and what conditions that enabled or hampered adaptation.

We also aim to explore how traditional anticipatory approaches can be combined with approaches that aim to increase adaptive capacity.

The study will be concentrated to the Malmö area, where we currently are involved in collaborative work concerning the development of RVA-processes, but our ambition is to draw conclusions that are more broadly applicable.