Prioritizing stakeholder interactions in disaster management: A TOPSIS-based decision support tool for enhancing community resilience

Abstract

The escalating impact of disasters underscores the urgency of building resilient communities. Interactions among community stakeholders play a pivotal role in fostering resilience but improving such interactions is often hindered by competing priorities and resource limitations. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a decision support tool aimed at prioritizing context-specific interventions that enhance stakeholder interactions in disaster management. The tool includes two phases: (1) impact-based prioritization, identifying the most significant factors influencing interactions by evaluating the relative importance of each factor based on their direct and indirect influence; and (2) feasibility-based prioritization, assessing the practicality of interventions designed to improve the significant factors identified in phase 1. We surveyed Spanish emergency experts to gather data on the interaction factors and their evaluations against the decision-making criteria. We applied the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) to analyze data. The results indicate that initiatives focusing on enhancing the leadership skills of emergency managers emerge as the most feasible and impactful interventions in our case study, followed by initiatives for facilitating community participation in the decision-making process and disaster response activities. On the other hand, initiatives for improving emergency response functionality, and disaster risk management plans are less feasible to implement. Additionally, we evaluated the usability and practicality of the tool together with emergency experts from different sectors. The tool received an overall positive evaluation from the experts, highlighting the significance of human factors such as status quo bias and structuring human judgment in decision-support tools while acknowledging potential resistance from users in utilizing such tools due to lack of education and training. The tool empowers policymakers and practitioners to effectively build resilient communities by offering them a systematic approach to prioritize context-specific interventions that enhance community resilience.