Evaluating Partnerships to Enhance Disaster Risk Management using Multi-Criteria Analysis: An Application at the Pan-European Level

Disaster risk is increasingly recognized as a major development challenge. Recent calls emphasize the need to proactively engage in disaster risk reduction, as well as to establish new partnerships between private and public sector entities in order to decrease current and future risks. Very often such potential partnerships have to meet different objectives reflecting on the priorities of stakeholders involved. Consequently, potential partnerships need to be assessed on multiple criteria to determine weakest links and greatest threats in collaboration. This paper takes a supranational multi-sector partnership perspective, and considers possible ways to enhance disaster risk management in the European Union by better coordination between the European Union Solidarity Fund, risk reduction efforts, and insurance mechanisms. Based on flood risk estimates we employ a risk-layer approach to determine set of options for new partnerships and test them in a high-level workshop via a novel cardinal ranking based multi-criteria approach. Whilst transformative changes receive good overall scores, we also find that the incorporation of risk into budget planning is an essential condition for successful partnerships.