Adaptation and resilience after Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy

Climate change increasingly affects all regions around the world. The subsequent increased frequency and intensity of natural hazards poses risks to societies that have not yet adapted to this new reality. Hurricane Katrina and hurricane Sandy have served as examples for the importance and urgence of adaptation measures and simultaneously showed the importance of international communication when combatting these issues, as areas struck by change often lack resources to prepare and prevent for future events. Therefore, this research paper focuses on local impact of natural hazards but looks further than just local drivers of policy change, discovering international influences driving policy change. Although this master thesis tries to address this problem from a public administration perspective, it emphasizes the importance of a holistic, multidisciplinary approach in such matters. This paper thus seeks to create a complementary framework that explains policy change after natural disasters. It does so by applying the two theories of policy change that are assumed to have explanatory value in the case of policy change after hurricane Sandy and hurricane Katrina. The Multiple Streams Approach (MSA) and theory of policy transfer are used, both theories provide tools to analyze policy change, but singly seem insufficient to provide a comprehensive explanation of policy change after natural disasters. Whereas the Multiple Streams Approach has significant explanatory power for policy change, it fails to incorporate the importance of international knowledge which has become essential for creating resilience to climate change. Therefore, this research paper compares the explanatory power of both theories and seeks to solve the gaps in the Multiple Streams Approach (MSA) with results and insights provided by theory of policy transfer