Civil protection must relate, on the one hand, to a complex social and environmental context characterised by multiple risks and, on the other, to a regulatory framework that is constantly evolving. For CIMA Research Foundation, approaching the subject by means of governance and responsibility means continuing to develop the interdisciplinary study of risks and their assessment and management processes, but it also means opening up to social research and the elaboration and experimentation of innovative forms of governance.
Starting from the analysis of judicial cases regarding legal responsibility, doctrinal studies on liability in civil protection activities and best practices, the programme Governance&Responsibility in Civil Protection Systems contributes to the establishment of a status of “Model Agent – and System – that is able to account for the reasons for its actions. Moreover, the programme aims to develop within CIMA Research Foundation the ability to account and be accountable for collective and individual action, both in the legal and social spheres.
The programme also deals with the issue of climate change adaptation processes, with the aim of identifying innovative governance pathways that can increase the resilience of communities to natural hazards and improve decision-making capacity in a context of increasing uncertainty and large time scales. A challenge in this field is the need to improve the processes of defining adaptation strategies through a better dialogue between scientific knowledge and local territories’ development priorities, identifying solutions to bring out the specific knowledge, skills and needs of the communities we will be working with in the near future.
On the basis of the methodologies applied during the studies on legal responsibility carried out on the Civil Protection System, the programme attempts to define an initial framework of the regulatory instruments for adaptation envisaged in the Italian context from the national to the local level, trying to identify recurring patterns of integration between the different administrative levels and, where they exist, the responsibilities assigned to the different actors, comparing the Italian case with other systems at a European level.