Integrating Stakeholder Value Systems into Disaster Resilience Planning: A Value-Driven Framework for Collaborative Decision Making

Abstract

Disaster resilience planning involves complex decision-making processes marked by constant negotiation, competition, and cooperation among stakeholders from the public, private, and non-profit sectors and at-risk communities. Central to these processes are stakeholders' value systems: the things that are of importance to them (e.g., safety to residents, profit to home developer, affordability). The differences in stakeholder value systems often give rise to conflicts and disputes when selecting and implementing disaster resilience strategies. These conflicts not only lead to delays in resilience-focused decision-making processes and investments, but could also result in significant financial implications, costing millions of dollars in future disaster losses. While there have been many advances on collaborative decision making in disaster literature, there remain two major gaps: the lack of (1) fundamental understanding of stakeholder value systems in disaster resilience; and (2) a value-driven collaborative decision-making framework that integrates multi-sector stakeholder values. To address these gaps, the goal of this dissertation is to build a new value-driven framework that accounts for stakeholder value systems in community resilience planning. This dissertation comprises four interconnected research tasks. First, this research examines stakeholder value systems on community resilience across different communities (e.g., coastal versus inland, metropolitan versus non-metropolitan, and communities with differing levels of social vulnerability) in Florida. Second, this research investigates existing collaboration patterns among multisector stakeholders in resilience planning in the Greater Miami and the Beaches region through social network analysis. Third, this research develops a Stakeholder Value Unification (SVU) model that integrates reinforcement learning with network analysis to help unify diverse stakeholder value systems while accounting for stakeholders' network positions. Finally, this research proposes a Stakeholder-Centric Resilience Evaluation Framework (SCREF) that evaluates alternative resilience strategies based on stakeholder value systems across different disaster phases. This research makes a significant contribution to the body of knowledge in the domain of disaster resilience by developing a value-driven framework that integrates the value systems of various stakeholders as well as their network positions in resilience planning. The practical implementation of this framework is expected to enhance disaster resilience strategies, making them more inclusive, efficient, and effective in addressing the varied needs and values of stakeholders. The outcomes from this research have the potential to reduce conflicts and delays, mitigate financial losses, and strengthen overall community resilience in disaster-prone regions.