Vulnerability

This chapter reviews the literature on vulnerability. Together with Chapter 3, that offers a literature review specifically focused on resilience, it lays the conceptual foundations for the empirical chapters in this edited volume. Vulnerability symbolizes the susceptibility of a certain system to the damage caused by a natural or man-made disaster and resilience is related to the capacity of this system to handle shocks and maintain its fundamental functions and structures. The operationalization of vulnerability poses several challenges to scholars due to its multidimensional and complex nature. As a result, definitions of vulnerability vary between different disciplines and even within the same discipline and diverse methodological approaches have been developed to assess vulnerability. This chapter critically reviews these various definitions of as well as theoretical and methodological approaches to the notion of vulnerability