Paper short abstract:

This paper presents an ethnographic examination of how local perceptions of and responses to flood risk in contemporary Scotland are both shaped by and expressed as resistance to official emergency flood response advice, as part of broader processes of transformative social change.

Paper long abstract:

Local perceptions of and responses flood risk in contemporary Scotland can be seen to be shaped by and expressed as a resistance to official emergency flood response advice and strategy developments in ways that reflect broader processes of change with wider Scottish and UK socio-cultural and political contexts. Using ethnographic information obtained from field research in both urban and rural Scottish contexts and with official emergency response bodies, this paper examines how tensions between local responses and official actions as well as suspicion and controversy regarding recent initiatives to encourage local participation and to include public opinion in official risk reduction strategy developments are not only representative of local resistance to neoliberal government agendas and centralised control, but demonstrative of local agency and cultural identities that seek to creatively deploy lived experiences of weather and the language and discourse of climate change as part of initiatives for progressive socio-cultural and political change. The paper will then explore the implications of these tensions between official organisational formal response strategies and local perceptions within the broader field of Disaster Risk Reduction, with a particular focus on how official organisational responses that primarily focus on safeguarding human welfare are often perceived to lack the fluid, dynamic, temporal and contextual reality of the lived experience of adapting to environmental change.