Handeln vor der Katastrophe als politische Herausforderung

How do we as a society cope with future hazards? In an increasing number of German policy areas, ‘risk’ is a key term in important policy documents. Risk may then give rise to the idea of risk governance, which implies the analysis, assessment and management of risks in a sustained societal process. This conceptualisation of risk governance allows us to normatively focus political action on disaster prevention instead of on coping with disasters after they have occurred. This study analyses policy translation from an international to a national level in terms of the EU flood risk management directive, the approach to risk analysis used by the German Federal Agency for civil protection and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction to find out if the potential of risk governance is being exploited and how extensively responsibility is being transferred from the state to citizens in this process. Finally, the author concludes that several important factors hinder a normative shift towards disaster prevention.