© 2013 Dr. Paulina Paz Aldunce Ide ; There is an imperative to search for approaches that can further develop Disaster Risk Management (DRM), in order to confront the increasingly devastating impacts of disasters; and the challenges and uncertainty climate change is posing through an expected rise in frequency and magnitude of hazards. In this realm, the resilience perspective emerges as a plausible approach, and although it is not a new concept for DRM practitioners and researchers, it has generated great policy traction in the last decade as it has been strongly introduced into the policy arena. However, there is no single, agreed definition of resilience and in fact the idea of resilience is highly controversial and contested, with few empirical studies available to inform theory or show its application in practice. Therefore, this thesis aimed to extend the understanding of resilience by addressing the research question: How do different stakeholders understand and construct ideas associated with the integration of resilience into disaster risk management in the context of changes in institutional arrangements? This research investigated the construction of the disaster resilience discourse in a case study of a disaster management initiative in Australia: the Natural Disaster Resilience Program (NDRP), in Queensland. Using Hajer’s ‘Social-interactive discourse theory’, together with practitioners’ in-depth interviews, a document analysis of program and government artefacts, and observation of different activities at various sites, the methods combine to present a clearer understanding of the complexity inherent in changes in a policy domain. The research findings show that practitioners understand and construct the meaning of disaster resilience differently, which is embedded in their diverse storylines, and importantly the divergences among these storylines reveal possibilities for social learning and reframing to occur. The resilience discourse is considered by the study participants as a shift in ...