In a recent academic paper with Graziano Ceddia and colleagues we have looked at a policy imlementation network in Austria for evidence of adaptive capacity.  In outline, we find that before implementing the latest EU regulation, flood risk management was fragmented;  since the latest implementation round this has shifted into a more coherent framework; but that this optimisation has been at the expense of non-governmental stakeholders.

This work was funded by the EU’s Joint Research Council and underpins their interest in how policies impact established institutional structures and disaster response mechanisms.  We had previously published one more paper in this area employing the same data but the latest paper is more directly looking at the policy network.

I have worked on the theme of policy robustness and resilience the last couple of years, with numerous conference presentations and a couple of papers in the pipeline.   I have looked at a number of research designs with alternative ideas for running quasi-experiments.  Quite exciting.  More to follow ….