Abstract
Public authorities across all governance levels in Germany call for improved private risk reduction in the context of climate change. Communication is seen as an important means to increase climate resilience of private households. This contribution argues that empowering communication beyond a neoliberal transfer of responsibilities requires not only more intensive public risk communication, but also more strategic approaches toward risk communication led by justifiable assumptions about the effect potentials of measures—e.g. reflecting specific motivation factors. The contribution presents a strategy example applied to private households in small and medium-sized towns in Germany. It argues that public and private actors both benefit from adopting new role models that facilitate multilateral communication for more climate resilience to natural hazards like inundations, heavy precipitation, and heat waves.
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Notes
- 1.
Deutsche Anpassungsstrategie an den Klimawandel (DAS) can be translated as German adaptation strategy to climate change.
- 2.
Section 9.3 highlights further dimensions of complexity in risk communication to increase the climate resilience of private actors through the analysis of a strategy example. This especially provides the opportunity to consider the complexity of local context conditions and social processes for increasing the climate resilience at the household level.
- 3.
Schaminée (2018) proposes that design thinking is meant to solve wicked problems—societal problems that are characterized by only very little causal knowledge and no consensus how to deal with the problem from an evaluative viewpoint. However, design thinking is also meant to be beneficial in situations in which public, private, and intermediary actors have many options of problem understanding and strategy design and need to find a way to deal with complex real-life problems to avoid information overload and confusion (Ansell & Torfing, 2014b; Weick, 1995, p. 27).
- 4.
The three levels of strategic risk communication to increase the climate resilience of private households are analyzed from a micro-perspective on social action (Hutter & Olfert, 2021). In contrast, a meso- or macro-perspective would highlight the governance constellations, processes, and conditions. For instance, Healey (2007) distinguishes between governance episodes, processes, and cultures to analyze strategic spatial planning in cities and regions.
- 5.
The antonym to this is purely institutionalized action in the sense of pure imitation which excludes deliberation.
- 6.
Further criteria are, among others, legitimacy, acceptability, and flexibility (e.g., Vetter and Schauser [2013] for an overview in regard of measures for climate change adaptation). The following focuses on the intended effects of communicative measures. Unintended, especially negative, effects of measures are placed in the background of argumentation. We will not elaborate on the classic issue of diverse meanings of causality (see Goertz and Mahoney [2012] and Gerring and Christenson [2017] for an introduction in this issue).
- 7.
The typology displays the typical form of a 2 × 2-matrix (Gerring & Christenson, 2017, p. 19). In line with methodological considerations on qualitative research, this is a heuristic approach to develop a matrix typology of design options. In qualitative research understood as descriptive and causal research on only one to few cases (Gerring & Christenson, 2017; Goertz & Mahoney, 2012), we seek to identify mutually exclusive types to differentiate a phenomenon through using a set of categories. In contrast, quantitative researchers are more concerned about population of cases and variables that imply ratio scales (gradual variation with a true zero). However, qualitative (small-N) and quantitative (large-N) researchers are mutually dependent on each other, which holds also for developing typologies (Collier et al., 2012).
- 8.
For instance, Wirth et al. (2014, p. 33) name 18 success factors for good communication mainly with reference to content, target groups, motivational elements. Adekola (2020) summarizes a range of requirements for good communication. Many other authors emphasize single or several of these requirements.
- 9.
Private Eigenvorsorge can be translated as private self-provision.
- 10.
The project PIVO is coordinated by the UFZ—Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Leipzig; further partners are the University of Leipzig, ZEW—Leibniz-Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung and 2av.
- 11.
We understand the term flood management in a broad sense that goes far beyond the physical action and also includes all instances of analysis, planning, and of course all forms of communication between affected and otherwise involved actors. Here, we intentionally emphasize the communication by explicit pronunciation beside the term management.
- 12.
Main parts of site based preparation and implementation is realized by the partner UFZ.
- 13.
The evaluation approach is developed by the partner University of Leipzig.
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Olfert, A., Hutter, G. (2022). Strategic Risk Communication to Increase the Climate Resilience of Households—Conceptual Insights and a Strategy Example from Germany. In: Thaler, T., Hartmann, T., Slavíková, L., Tempels, B. (eds) Homeowners and the Resilient City. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17763-7_9
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