Rethinking the share of responsibilities in disaster preparedness to encourage individual preparedness for flash floods in urban areas

Reducing the risk of disaster linked to major flash floods requires multi-scale preparedness measures. The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction encourages the involvement of vulnerable people as technical measures are often insufficient to decrease the risk of disaster. Yet local authorities often struggle to motivate people to prepare, even in cases where the risk of disaster is well known. To address this issue, this article explores how the responsibility for preparedness is shared among stakeholders. We analyze the preparedness process in the flash-flood-prone Richelieu neighborhood of Nîmes, a city in the south of France. This neighborhood was devastated by a major flood in 1988 and several times by minor floods. We use a mixed-method approach based on a quantitative analysis of a questionnaire administered throughout the city of Nîmes and a qualitative analysis of interviews conducted with local stakeholders more specifically in the Richelieu neighborhood. We explore the major obstacles to individual willingness to prepare and highlight multiple forms of marginalization that impede individual willingness despite the recent disasters and the well-known vulnerability of the neighborhood. We argue that there is an inconsistency between a centralized top-down DRR approach and the appeal from city authorities for individual preparedness. We argue that the way responsibility for preparedness is shared has to be transformed through a holistic approach in order to encourage individual willingness to prepare for flash floods.