The Risk-Tandem Framework: Combining risk governance and knowledge co-production toward integrated disaster risk management and climate adaptation

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Summary

The challenges of the Anthropocene are growing ever more complex and uncertain, underpinned by the emergence of systemic risks. At the same time, the landscape of risk governance has become compartmentalised and siloed, characterized by non-overlapping activities, competing scientific discourses, and distinct responsibilities distributed across diverse public and private bodies.

This paper presents the Risk-Tandem Framework for bridging theory and practice; to guide and structure the integration of disaster risk management (DRM), climate change adaptation (CCA) and systemic risk management through a process of transdisciplinary knowledge co-production. The paper outlines how the framework is developed, applied, and further refined within selected case study regions, including Denmark, Germany, Italy and the Danube Region.

Introduction

The Anthropocene continues to present new and evolving systemic risks and interconnected threats which are characterized by complexity, multiple uncertainties, and ambiguities, as well as cascading effects across scales. Departing from approaches favouring quantification, or single risk-centred assessments, complex and often non-quantifiable risk constellations have emerged from the shared dependencies of technological and social systems and infrastructures.

As a case in point, flooding in the Emilia-Romagna region in Italy better contextualises such dynamics for our purposes and demonstrates the importance of situating single-hazard scenarios in the continuum of systemic risks. As a combination of preceding droughts decreasing the permeability of the ground and storms in the Adriatic Sea preventing rivers from draining, heavy rain led to the overflowing of 23 rivers across 100 municipalities in Emilia-Romagna, triggering more than 400 landslides. Cascading impacts caused severe damage to infrastructure, contributed to the displacement of some 36,000 people, and had long-lasting effects on industry, tourism, and the environment.

Such events necessitate innovation that can go beyond the hierarchical or reductionist technological solutions that often fail to address cascading dynamics, transboundary tendencies, and emergent properties. More centrally, they require the accommodation of considerations for systemic interactions and complex risk scenarios, and understanding of their relationship with local dynamics, especially if one’s interest is to address discrepancies and redundancies in their joint management across stakeholders operating on multiple levels. While there has been growing interest in systems-driven analysis of risk and uncertainty management, adequate analysis and approaches to governing risks from a systems perspective are lacking.

As a response, Risk-Tandem Framework is designed to address these issues through real-world testing, refining, and co-production of new and existing risk governance tools, processes, and solutions with stakeholders, in efforts to patch gaps between theory, data, and practical challenges. By placing knowledge co-production and stakeholder engagement at its centre, the framework creates a context-led and integrated approach to tackling risks in polycentric governance settings, characterised by abundance of technical information (that may not meet the needs of its users), disciplinary silos, and limited coordination between actors across levels. 

Methodology

Risk-Tandem builds upon existing knowledge, and promotes new ways of thinking and working with existing methods, toward building a comprehensive understanding of complexity and risk management. Recognising the crux of the issue (a lack of a shared consensus, and mechanisms for its generation), frameworks were selected with a focus on stakeholder engagement and knowledge co-production, both crucial for enabling integrated risk management and climate change adaptation facing a complex governance landscape.

Risk-Tandem incorporates and is inspired by methods, tools and best practices of the International Risk Governance Council’s (IRGC) Risk Governance Framework, The SHIELD Model for harmonising disaster risk management and climate change adaptation capacities, the Tandem Framework for co-production, and the Risk-Layering approach to support decision-making. The frameworks were chosen due to their empirically evidenced application in case studies, but also with consideration of their individual gaps: we seek to combine them to address these weaknesses, and to advance their transdisciplinary implementation in a manner informed by the context.

Risk-Tandem Framework

By bridging gaps and existing knowledges, the Risk-Tandem Framework harmonizes existing methodologies in a more concise and approachable manner, with an emphasis on aims and challenges regarding the interoperability of data, knowledge, communication, resources, and governance systems at different levels.  It comprises two main components as represented below. Stakeholder engagement is placed at the centre considering the connection between the SHIELD Model theme on engaging stakeholders, the IRGC Risk Governance Framework’s focus on stakeholder engagement and Tandem Step 1 on scoping.

The orange puzzle pieces show the iterative progression of the Tandem process, surrounded by the phases of the IRGC Risk Governance Framework which will embed Risk-Layering and the general categorisation scheme of frequent, infrequent, and catastrophic risks as part of the analysis and co-production process. In the outer green circle, some of the SHIELD themes supporting the integration of DRM and CCA have been restructured to better align with the Risk-Tandem Framework, but its principles and guiding questions will continue to apply. The framework (and associated tools, under development at the time of writing) can identify the key entry points for embedding and sustaining the outputs and solutions generated through the knowledge co-production process and into practice or policy. 

Phases

Application of the Risk-Tandem Framework begins with Real-World Labs, referring to four different European case study sites in which it is implemented and refined with local risk governance stakeholders (through workshops, capacity development, research, and continuous consultations). For the specific purposes of the DIRECTED project, the phases have been separated into four years based on the Tandem (however, different timelines can be established depending on the context, challenges, and project purpose) with distinct goals and objectives, all leading toward institutionalisation and up-scaling of the processes as introduced and refined during the project phases. 

Currently, the framework is now being applied, tested, and refined for different DRM/CCA integration challenges across four multi-stakeholder Real-World Labs (RWL), including regions in Denmark, Germany, Italy as well as the Danube region. Thus far, the Risk-Tandem Framework phases applied in the Real-World Labs have been the Foundation Phase and the Growth Phase which focused on stakeholder identification, mapping, and co-exploration of the risk and governance contexts building on knowledge co-production and pre-assessment methodologies, as well as setting priorities for action, learning and capacity development.

Insights from the Foundation Phase demonstrated that the Risk-Tandem Framework helped Real-World Lab hosts to guide the initial set-up of their labs to involve multiple diverse stakeholders across levels and sectors of government, especially municipalities, civil protection and sectoral actors (e.g. environment, water boards), while recognising the challenge to include citizens and volunteers. Guiding questions on risk governance were provided to the Real-World Lab hosts, who used this to develop tailored questionnaires or workshop activities for their stakeholders. Real-World Lab hosts were able to engage with their stakeholders around the governance, communication and data/modelling capacities and needs for integration or interoperability to capture synergies across institutions. The capacity development activities related to knowledge co-production for Real-World Lab hosts included a guidance on interactive workshop exercises, an online training module on complex risks, in-person training on use of World Cafes, serious games, and creative co-exploration exercises, as well as workshop preparation and debriefing calls to ensure a supportive and reflexive approach to respond to their needs.

Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning

Implementation of the Risk-Tandem Framework is a continuous process of reflexive evaluation and learning to effectively manage risks, and to monitor impact of the process. Given its locally led nature, the MEL and associated indicators are therefore not static, but instead co-designed for each RWL. Building upon components of the IRGC Risk Governance Framework and the SHIELD Model, the Risk-Tandem Framework will be evaluated in five primary dimensions, with a specific set of outcome indicators that are to be developed with stakeholders. MEL will contribute to the revision and testing of Risk-Tandem methods and tools that will evidence its impacts based on lessons learned, and promote its replicability in other contexts.

Conclusion

The Risk Tandem Framework (combining systems thinking, knowledge co-production and tools of risk governance), can offer a solution for thinking about risk issues and applying existing tools in new ways, led by priorities of local stakeholders. On the other hand, collaboration and knowledge integration processes require technical approaches ranging from understanding probabilities and event distributions to prioritizing available options based on well-informed risk assessments that all involved stakeholders can agree upon.

Risk-Tandem, however, cannot offer a panacea. The implementation of the Framework in a Real-World Lab setting is a resource intensive task, requiring complementary research, monitoring, evaluation and learning approaches, as well as the constant revising of the Framework’s activities to respond to emerging needs – all the while balancing its implementation between theory and practice as it is primarily implemented by local stakeholders. Therefore, the suggestions of the paper are not to be considered as a final “product”, but rather a theory-informed framework and an approach which we suggest can cultivate new information and new ways of thinking around shared challenges through knowledge co-production in risk governance contexts. Through this engagement, however, the framework will be further developed to support practical implementation, including guidance and activities. The ultimate aim is to provide an iterative, reflexive and process-based approach to transdisciplinary co-production in risk governance contexts, versatile enough to be used by stakeholders, practitioners and decision makers at various scales navigating complex risk governance challenges.

Suggested citation

Parviainen, J., Hochrainer-Stigler, S., Cumiskey, L., Bharwani, S., Schweizer, P.-J., Hofbauer, B., & Cubie, D. (2025). The Risk-Tandem Framework: An iterative framework for combining risk governance and knowledge co-production toward integrated disaster risk management and climate change adaptation. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 116, 105070. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2024.105070