Meeting at the crossroads? Developing national strategies for disaster risk reduction and resilience: Relevance, scope for, and challenges to, implementation

Increasing impacts from disasters and climate hazards have prompted international efforts to promote the development of national disaster risk reduction and resilience (DRRR) strategies intended to reduce mortality and other losses. The development of such strategies is the subject of target E of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015–2030). Furthermore, an increasing understanding of the need to address the root causes of risk has led to calls for greater coherence between strategies that focus on DRRR, and those dedicated to climate change adaptation and sustainable development goals. The purpose of this paper is to increase knowledge on associated decision-making in general, and in Sweden in particular. We analyze the relevance and scope of a Swedish DRRR strategy, and identify drivers and barriers to integrated development and implementation. Based on document reviews, and interviews and group discussions with representatives in Sweden and six European countries, the results highlight a growing awareness that much remains to be learnt and shared between domains in order to progress towards integrated DRRR and more climate-proof sustainable development. In practice, most strategies are developed independently and related actors work in silos, leading to power struggles with negative impacts on national and local capacity. At the same time, windows of opportunity are appearing for the development of national DRRR strategies and increased policy coherence. We discuss these, and present some policy recommendations.