Worthy of protection: for whom and against what? : An analyzis of resilience, vulnerability and underlying riskfactors in local risk- and vulnerability analyses

This essay is about how the concepts of resilience and vulnerability are expressed in local vulnerability analyses. The essay also highlights underlying structures and driving forces to risk and vulnerability in the selected risk- and vulnerability analyses. The purpose is to examine and analyze how resilience and vulnerability in society is reflected in local risk- and crisis management with a selection of municipal risk- and vulnerability assesments as an exempel. The chosen method in this work is qualitative text analysis. The result indicates that the general focus in the analyzed material is on municipal activties and events of chock or crisis. The perspectives on risk and vulnerability that is being used equates risks with events and vulnerability as the effect of those events. In regards of resilience and the 3D Resilience framework from Bené et al.(2012) the risk- and vulnerability analyses are therefore at most related to the first two dimensions: absorption and adaption. Above all the municipalities wants to attain stability and robustness while resisting the effects of chock or crisis events to be able to revert to pre-chock state. Vulnerability is being reflected as a contrast to the abilities the municipalities aim for with their crisis response. That sort of understanding and assessment of risk and vulnerability pays barely no attention at all to underlying driving forces to risk and crisis. Even if in some cases there seems to be a will to try and include issuess like social vulnerability and social inequalities