Using learning to harness social and organizational culture for disaster risk reduction

The paper explores how learning within and across organizations can enhance disaster risk reduction (DRR) and community resilience. It identifies key facilitators of learning, such as high leadership commitment and skilled mediation, and barriers, including the exclusion of stakeholders and unclear project aims. The document details the EDUCEN project's application of social learning, social network analysis, and knowledge transfer to integrate cultural aspects into DRR. It emphasizes that resilience requires adaptive governance and the ability of communities to learn from past disasters to improve future risk reduction measures.

• Factors that foster learning within disaster risk reduction (DRR) include the presence of highly engaged organizers, technically skilled mediators or facilitators, strong commitment from leaders, the maintenance of project legitimacy and openness, and the provision of continuous feedback.
• Barriers to learning in the context of the EDUCEN project include a lack of clarity regarding the status and goals of an initiative, the failure to include all relevant stakeholders, ambiguity concerning the roles and timing of stakeholder involvement, a lack of belief among stakeholders that their contributions matter, and a mismatch between the project's scale and the stakeholders' interests.
• Organizational resilience in emergency functions is characterized by three main attributes: situational awareness (knowledge of the wider network and resources), management of keystone vulnerabilities (identifying critical tangible or intangible components), and adaptive capacity (flexibility in leadership and knowledge management).
• Social learning is a cyclical process that can trigger resilience building through four primary factors: the communication of personalized information to motivate behavioral change, the identification of influential external drivers or opinion leaders, the use of disasters as 'windows of opportunity' or 'threshold events' for transformation, and the creation of an enabling organizational environment.
• Social network analysis (SNA) is utilized by EDUCEN to map institutional and informal DRR networks, identify 'cultural brokers', analyze differences in risk perception among various networks, and examine the relationship between social networks and urban infrastructure during emergency management.
• To facilitate the transfer of successful DRR measures between cities, EDUCEN employs 'Learning Loops', which are continuous processes of self-learning and mutual learning that scale up from adapting methodologies in case studies to transferring activities between pilot cities and eventually constructing a wider network of cities.

APA

Barquet, K., Thomalla, F., Boyland, M., & Osbeck, M. (2016). Using learning to harness social and organizational culture for disaster risk reduction. Stockholm Environment Institute. https://www.sei.org/mediamanager/documents/Publications/SEI-WP-2016-10-EDUCEN-Using-learning-for-DRR.pdf

Chicago

Barquet, Karina, Frank Thomalla, Michael Boyland, and Maria Osbeck. Using learning to harness social and organizational culture for disaster risk reduction. Stockholm Environment Institute, 2016. https://www.sei.org/mediamanager/documents/Publications/SEI-WP-2016-10-EDUCEN-Using-learning-for-DRR.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Barquet |first1=Karina |last2=Thomalla |first2=Frank |last3=Boyland |first3=Michael |last4=Osbeck |first4=Maria |title=Using learning to harness social and organizational culture for disaster risk reduction |publisher=Stockholm Environment Institute |date=October 2016 |url=https://www.sei.org/mediamanager/documents/Publications/SEI-WP-2016-10-EDUCEN-Using-learning-for-DRR.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{barquet2016using, author = {Barquet, Karina and Thomalla, Frank and Boyland, Michael and Osbeck, Maria}, title = {{Using learning to harness social and organizational culture for disaster risk reduction}}, institution = {Stockholm Environment Institute}, year = {2016}, month = oct, url = {https://www.sei.org/mediamanager/documents/Publications/SEI-WP-2016-10-EDUCEN-Using-learning-for-DRR.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }