Development of a professional doctoral programme in built environment to enhance societal resilience to disasters

Abstract

Integrating disaster resilience into education is a key factor for reducing the adverse impact of future disasters. This paper in this context presents the methodology of developing an innovative professional doctoral programme (DProf) that integrates professional and academic knowledge in the built environment to enhance societal resilience to disasters. The DProf programme addresses the career needs of practicing professionals, particularly those in, or who aspire to, senior positions within the construction industry and caters for the researching professional. In developing the DProf programme, a detailed market needs analysis for built environment stakeholders to increase societal resilience to disasters was conducted capturing inter-disciplinary needs across a range of stakeholders and countries. A series of semi-structured interviews on current and emerging market needs with members of six built environment related stakeholders, namely, local and national governments; community; NGOs, INGOs and other international agencies; academia and research organisations; and private sector facilitated the aforementioned analysis. Qualitative data analysis techniques were employed in analysing the interview data. The findings of the interviews revealed the current and emerging needs and skills of the six stakeholders related to built environment professionals towards enhancing social, economic, technological, environmental and institutional dimensions of disaster resilience of societies. These findings were used to develop the appropriate learning outcomes and the content of taught and research components of the DProf programme.