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Shimla is a teeming city, with a population of 140,000. It is located in the north Indian Himalayas, in an area of high seismicity that was rocked by a devastating earthquake a hundred years ago. However, it is oblivious of the ticking time bomb below its foundations. Initiating risk reduction in this fast growing urban economic hub is an enormous challenge. A national non-governmental organisation (NGO) called SEEDS (Sustainable Environment and Ecological Development Society) started working in the city just before the earthquake centenary, with the aim to identify ways of reducing earthquake risk through actions that could be carried out by the citizens and the local government.

The experience has been unique, and has led to further refinement of the community action planning approach that SEEDS (Sustainable Environment and Ecological Development Society) has picked up and worked with over the last ten years in different vulnerable communities in the region. What emerges from the experience is a mix of tools for the improvement of technical aspects, community-based working approaches and governance for risk reduction. It is evident that community-local government-NGO partnerships are the key to solving such acute problems as earthquake safety in a resource strapped, vulnerable city. The assessment and planning phases initiate the building of these partnerships in the early stages of the process.

This paper is an attempt to share the experience of developing and testing a community based urban risk reduction approach for a city at extreme earthquake risk.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the findings from the body of case studies offered in the issue, combined with three external perspectives on local voices and action.

Using as its basis the eight key case studies and three external contributions to the special issue, the paper offers a theoretical framework as a basis for discussion of this material. Through this, it identifies possible modes of action understood through the theoretical framework and elaborated through the specific cases. It concludes with proposals for further work.

The discussion finds that from a local perspective, the ambitions of local populations and local NGOs to achieve emancipatory change depend on the scope for local collaboration and partnerships to exercise influence on underlying risk factors. It resolves the suggested tension between operating within, and outside the system through the concept of “legitimate subversion”.

It is felt that the original recording of case studies of local level action combined with the process of iterative critical reflection on the part of the contributors offers a novel approach to knowledge creation from practice, and offers insights bridging theoretical and practitioner perspectives into means of addressing underlying risk factors affecting local populations.

The purpose of this paper is to individually examine the findings from eight case studies presented in this special issue and comparatively identify the findings regarding local learning and action.

Underlying research questions regarding power and powerlessness in regard to addressing underlying risk factors affecting local populations form the basis for the discussion. Proceedings of a collaborative workshop conducted with the contributing authors are analysed qualitatively to identify learning relating to the research questions emerging from the case studies individually and collectively.

A number of strategies and tactics for addressing underlying risk factors affecting local populations were identified from the case studies, including collaboration and cohesion. Campaigning, lobbying, communications and social mobilisation in an attempt to bridge the gap between local concerns and the decision-making of government and other powerful actors. Innovation and local mobilisation to address shortcomings in government support for disaster reduction and development. Communications as a first base to influence behaviour of both communities and government. Social change through empowerment of women to act in disaster reduction and development.

The outcomes of the action research conducted by the authors individually and collectively highlight the necessity for bridging different scales of action through a range of strategies and tactics to move beyond local self-reliance to influence on underlying risk factors. The action research process employed may have wider applications in gathering and formalising local-level experience and knowledge.

The case studies and their analysis present a range of practical strategies and tactics to strengthen local resilience and address underlying risk factors which are replicable in other contexts.

Practitioners are activists and do not often engage in critical reflection and analysis. The method presented here offers a means of achieving this in order to generate learning from local-level experience. The findings contribute to the consideration of cross-scale action to address underlying risk factors which impact local communities.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate practical approaches to addressing issues of risk reduction and disaster prevention in urban areas. In addition to exposure to natural hazards, urban areas represent complex risks and vulnerabilities together with complicated governance structures.

To address the challenge, SEEDS mobilised a “Disaster Watch Forum” – a citizens’ platform that brought citizens together to proactively engage with the local government. With hand-holding support from SEEDS, training by domain experts, internal team building and the forum has become a credible people-based institution addressing issues of risk reduction and prevention.

Urban risk reduction has remained a challenging issue with solutions often sought in high investment structural interventions. These have limited impact on the urban poor living in informal areas. This paper reveals “bottom-up” people-based approach that is able to engage with the “system” from “outside”. It reveals how people relate to day-to-day risks that affect their lives, making it the stepping stone to address higher order societal risks. Finally, the immense power and energy of youth and children work as local “agents of change”. Overall, the work aligns with priorities of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.

There are three principal implications for further research: with half the world now urbanized, urgent solutions are needed for improving disaster risk governance in cities; taking a “whole of society” approach in addressing a wider canvas of risks; and redirecting investments in urban areas towards managing risks, rather than managing disasters.

The model illustrated is replicable in urban areas facing risk. It worked well in a population catchment of 50,000 residents; to achieve scale would require enabling a federated structure of several localised forums.

The paper presents a hands-on experience in building an alternative approach to urban risk reduction. It has required authors to move from “government to governance” model making citizens active stakeholders in proactively addressing their own underlying vulnerabilities that lead to creation of and exacerbation of risks.

This paper aims to study differences in risk behavior between holding companies that undertake both banking activity and insurance underwriting (labeled financial holding companies or FHCs) and stand-alone bank holding companies (BHCs).

The paper examines the discretionary accruals of FHCs to comparable BHCs and compares their bad loans-to-assets ratio in the future.

FHCs have lower discretionary accruals (loan loss provisions and realized capital gains) than BHCs. FHCs fare better than BHCs in terms of bad loans-to-assets ratio. Insurance underwriting has a dampening effect on discretionary accruals of FHCs.

This study raises additional research questions. Do shared governance and insurance underwriting serve as substitutes or complements? Will regulatory environment affect this relation?

When reported earnings do not match true earnings, the market participants lose the ability to price correctly, and the regulators lose the ability to effectively regulate banks. From the regulatory perspective, these findings suggest insurance underwriting by banks mitigate potential market distortions.

This paper is the first to study the effect of underwriting insurance risk on earnings management behavior of BHCs and its link to risk governance.

Ethereum-based blockchain technology (EBT) affords members of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) a market advantage in deploying blockchain within their organizations, including cybersecurity and operational benefits, that leads firms to strategically invest in this nascent technology. However, the impact of such strategic investments in EBT has yet to be explored in the context of its relationship to firm value. Therefore, this study explores EBT-specific firm-level characteristics that result in a stock market reaction to announcements of strategic investments.

The authors use the event study methodology, strategic investment literature and signaling theory as contextualizing frameworks for their study. Additionally, the authors explore a new method for examining technology investments as a strategic counter to cybersecurity threats.

Firms that signal to the market their strong commitment to their strategic investment by developing an EBT proof of concept see significantly higher market returns. Firms that have had prior cybersecurity incidents are rewarded by the market for strategically investing in EBT, and when firms with large undistributed free cash flows utilize this cash for strategic EBT investment, the market is more likely to reward these firms, indicating the market views EBT investment positively in these circumstances.

The results of this study provide new evidence of the value impact of EBT for firms that suffered cybersecurity events in the past. The authors provide empirical evidence of firm-level characteristics that investors use to discern whether a strategic investment in EBT will drive organizational value. Likewise, the authors demonstrate how signaling affects investor perceptions of strategic information technology (IT) investments in EBT.

It has been observed in a number of recent disasters, and most evidently after the South Asian tsunami, that remote, underdeveloped, and most vulnerable communities take the longest to recover, in‐spite of an abundance of resources available for supporting them. The loss compounding approach of analysing the tsunami impact is a useful way of identifying those factors within the recovery process that need attention for helping affected communities get rehabilitated in a better and faster manner. The paper seeks to address this issue.

The paper looks at how and why the recovery process has been slower and less efficient in the tsunami affected small island communities of India as compared to the mainland communities. This is further analysed in terms of the physical, social and environmental impacts and their recovery aspects.

The paper identifies good governance and social capital as important elements for ensuring equitable recovery processes, and for ensuring appropriate capacity building in marginalised and highly vulnerable communities.

The practical implications of the discussed approach and findings are two pronged: governance needs to be responsive to community systems; and communities need to tap into their social capital to enhance their local coping capacities. Participation is a primary element in achieving these goals. Participation is a crucial element of governance to ensure that it is responsive, locally relevant, and accountable to specific needs of less represented communities. At the same time, it is also a critical process that enables local realilsation of needs and contexts, and creates an environment of capacity building at the grassroot level.

The paper highlights the continuing lack of recognition of the importance of local coping capacities, with no appreciation of the fact that rehabilitation needs to be based on local resources, determined by local capacities, and decided by local communities.

Risk management is one of the most important means of achieving sustainable development, while education is the most basic intervention required for addressing attitudes and changing community practice. Education for sustainable development is in this light a relatively passive yet extremely important intervention for ensuring long-term urban risk management, particularly if we want such risk management to be participatory and deeply engrained in community level practices. Information and communication management is the backbone of all the participatory processes involved in urban risk management. It is a cross cutting theme that touches each stage of the urban risk management process and is critical for ensuring that all the various stakeholders engaged in the activities operate in a coordinated, efficient, and effective manner. Education for sustainable development needs to identify and target such stakeholders who will, in the long run, make a sizeable difference by bringing about sustainability factors within urban field practice. Information and communication management is a means of smoothening the problems in the participatory processes, and for ensuring collectivity.

Cities and urban areas are increasingly becoming the settlement of choice for a majority of humans.

Many of the global environmental problems that we are now facing have their precedence and causes in the cities and urban areas we live in.

Lessons in understanding urban risk are now emerging – urban hazards and risk are predominantly human-induced, and exacerbate natural events. Various economic, social, and economic aspects compound the risks that urban residents face.

Urban lifestyles and resource consumptions can be directly or indirectly attributed to the many environmental consequences that we are seeing – both within the city, as well as the entire hinterland or urban watershed that it is located in.