How does social learning facilitate urban disaster resilience? A systematic review

ABSTRACT

Social learning has been considered an emerging policy option for urban disaster risk management. Urban disaster resilience is claimed to be a desirable outcome of many social learning programmes, but little systematic evidence illustrates how urban disaster resilience has been facilitated by social learning programmes. This paper presents a theoretic approach by a systematic review using the thematic content analysis method and finds that all of the social, technological and natural hazards can trigger social learning and the learning type varies according to ‘who learns’. It is showed that the mechanisms by which social learning can facilitate urban disaster resilience include: (1) governance capacity; (2) self-organisation; (3) cognitive change; (4) moral or civic responsibility; and (5) open communication and deliberation. Moreover, the leading roles in the risk management practice played by social learning to improve urban disaster resilience are achieved throughout three strategies: (1) meeting the public demands of risk perception; (2) getting more stakeholders involved into a collaborative process; and (3) joint problem-solving. The findings might provide guidelines for the implementation of social learning programme in the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban hazard
• urban disaster resilience
• social learning
• risk management
• thematic synthesis
• systematic review

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all of the unknown reviewers for their helpful comments on the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Key Project of China Ministry of Education for Philosophy and Social Science under Big Data Driven Risk Research on City's Public Safety [grant number 16JZD023]; the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Big Data Driven Risk Pre-Warning Research on City's Public Safety [grant number 17LZUJBWZD012] and Lanzhou university under Evidence-based Social Science Research [grant number 16LZUJBWTD013, 18LZUJBWZX006].