A maturity model for the involvement of stakeholders in the city resilience building process

Recent efforts undertaken by international organizations and national governments to build cities' resilience illustrate the need to involve the different stakeholders of a city in the city resilience building process. Although there are studies that propose frameworks for building resilient cities, these studies do not provide detailed guidelines that include the sequential steps that local governments need to take to involve the different stakeholders in the city resilience building process. Given this gap, this paper presents a maturity model that provides an ideal sequence of maturity stages that can guide local government in how to involve the different city stakeholders in the city resilience building process. In addition, the maturity model provides a number of policies that local governments need to implement at each maturity stage in order to foster four principles (collaboration and networking, awareness and commitment, learning, and training and preparedness) that represent the foundation for involving stakeholders in the resilience building process. The maturity model was developed and validated as result of an iterative process that included semi-structured interviews with representatives from six different European cities. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.