Community stakeholder perspective on construction industry-related needs and skills for enhancing disaster resilience

Although scientific research community has shown increased interest in enhancing disaster resilience of societies, yet effort at identifying the needs and skills of stakeholders affected by disasters has not received adequate attention. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify and assess the needs and skills of communities affected by disasters from four different countries. Community as one of the stakeholders in disaster resilience is considered as respondent in this study, due to the fact that they are on the frontlines of both the immediate impact of a disaster and the initial emergency response. Thus, identification of specific needs and skills requirement for the community in enhancing disaster resilience becomes imperative. The study adopted literature review and semi-structured interviews. The interviews were conducted with fifteen purposively selected experts in four different countries to include the UK, Estonia, Lithuania, and Sri Lanka. Data obtained were analysed using Nvivo (version 10). The study identified different needs and skills of communities related to built environment professionals towards enhancing disaster resilience. The identified needs and skills were grouped into five disaster resilience dimensions. This includes economic, environmental, institutional, social, and technological dimensions of disaster resilience of societies. These five groups were further structured into five different stages of the property lifecycle to include preparation, design, pre-construction, construction and use stages of a property development. Also, the overall identified needs and skills at different disaster resilience dimensions were filtered to generate twenty-nine major classifications of skills and needs of communities in enhancing disaster resilience of societies. This study would be beneficial to all construction professionals and other stakeholders in developing their competencies on the main classifications of needs and skills of communities identified in this study.