Building Participation to Reduce Vulnerability: How Can Local Educational Strategies Promote Global Resilience? A Case Study in Funchal – Madeira Island

Resilience is often a contested concept, but it appears to have an important role in Disaster Risk Reduction. Resilience focuses upon positive outcomes and implies a series of risk factors, environmental factors, and interpersonal factors. In this paper, resilience will be read as interpretation capacity and reaction alertness, in relation to a geographical and cultural context. Considering these characterizing factors of resilience, it is proposed as an experimental interdisciplinary and international tool of risk education, where the concept of resilience is revised in relation with landscape, in order to promote a “resilientscape”. “RE-thinking the landscape” is a place-based, bottom-up tool that involves different approaches, taken from geography, arts, history and botany, developed in the context of a museum in Funchal (Madeira island). The hypothesis of this paper is that population has in itself the ability to cope with disasters and risk. Accordingly, the main purposes are to unearth community capacity and to lay the groundwork for community participation in DRR according to PDRA strategies. The first part of the paper discusses the role of participation in building landscape resilience against natural hazards. The second part introduces and discusses the characteristics of the aforementioned tool, its strategies, goals, and experiments, starting with the work on landscape education conducted by Castiglioni (2012).