Chapter 11 of Community Disaster Recovery: Moving from Vulnerability to Resilience concludes the book be presenting key lessons from the study and provides recommendations to practitioners and disaster scholars who are working towards greater community-resilience and learning so that communities can prepare for and withstand extreme events in the future.

The first chapter provides an overview of the rise and popularity of entrepreneurship as a practice and as a scholarly field of research. It notes how entrepreneurship has been shown to contribute positively to economic development and that scholarship related to supporting entrepreneurs through building robust entrepreneurial ecosystems is on the rise. Entrepreneurial ecosystems can be defined as a community of entrepreneurs engaged in reciprocal social and economic exchanges in the context of intermediary organizations, other actors, and institutions. Such research has focused on theory refinement as well as the development of metrics and ‘playbooks’ for communities that want to foster entrepreneurship. While policymakers are increasingly support building successful entrepreneurial ecosystems in their cities and states through public funding, there continues to be a dearth of research that addresses the relevance of gender for understanding and supporting entrepreneurial ecosystems. This chapter emphasizes the relevance and importance of a gender perspective for understanding how and why entrepreneurial ecosystems may not benefit female entrepreneurs in the same ways that they benefit male entrepreneurs. It provides insights into the ways a gender perspective can contribute to a new conceptual model of entrepreneurial ecosystems and eventually lead to effective policies for inclusive economic development.

Chapter 8 of Community Disaster Recovery: Moving from Vulnerability to Resilience discusses the importance of relationships – with other governments and within a community – that can encourage or limit learning and resilience during disaster recovery. Important to this discussion are concepts related to the autonomy that local governments enjoy over their fiscal and decision-making affairs, intergovernmental relationships with state and federal agencies that can influence disaster recovery, and the dynamics of groups that form in the aftermath of a disaster. The chapter presents data to show that more collaborative intergovernmental relationships between state and local governments lead to higher levels of in-depth learning after disasters.

Chapter 7 of Community Disaster Recovery: Moving from Vulnerability to Resilience discusses the importance of relationships that can encourage or limit learning and resilience during disaster recovery. Perhaps most importantly, the nature of local government collaboration with various individuals and groups during the recovery process proved to be vital to recovery planning and decision-making. There are a variety of ways that residents and other stakeholders can engage with their local governments during disaster recovery and some of these more engaged groups can encourage policy learning and changes made by their local governments.

The International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (“ICSID” or “the Centre”) is the world’s leading institution devoted to international investment dispute settlement. It was established in 1966 by the Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes between States and Nationals of Other States (the “ICSID Convention”),1 a multilateral treaty proposed by the Executive Directors of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the “World Bank”). ICSID provides a unique treaty framework, procedural rules and independent facilities for the settlement of disputes between foreign investors and host States.

As discussed in Chapter 5, risk perceptions may be influenced by personal experiences, deeply held beliefs, and political ideology. But individual risk perceptions may also be affected by engagement in social processes, such as information seeking and participation in disaster-related discussions. Information sought and consumed after a disaster and trust in these sources of information may influence how individuals think about a disaster, its causes, and support (or not) of policy solutions (see Figure III.1). Furthermore, experiencing a disaster may erode trust in officials that are charged with managing disaster-related risks. Levels of trust in government officials may in turn influence information seeking and support for policy action. This chapter investigates the relationships among individual experiences, information seeking, participation in flood recovery processes, and attitudes toward risk mitigation actions.

When an international commercial dispute arises, the cost of resolving it may be as important to the parties as the merits of the claims themselves. Indeed, the cost of resolving a dispute may suffice, in some circumstances, to discourage a claim’s prosecution in a formal proceeding or to thwart its proper defense.1

This chapter shares examples of organization-level barriers to full participation of women in entrepreneurial ecosystems by way of the three cities that were the sites of our fieldwork—Boston, Massachusetts, St. Louis, Missouri, and Asheville, North Carolina. Here, the focus is on the ways in which intermediary organizations, such as incubators, accelerators, coworking spaces, and investors among others, can act as gatekeepers to the resources of the ecosystem. The chapter focuses specifically on access to networks, outreach, selection, support mechanisms (i.e., entrepreneur support organizations) available in the ecosystem, and ecosystem culture. In speaking to these issues, the chapter focuses on the role of meso-level organizational actors and how their norms, values, and practices differentially impact entrepreneurs and lead to inclusion or exclusion from the ecosystem.

As with all arbitration, consent lies at the root of arbitration of foreign investment disputes.1 It is all the more relevant in such arbitration as a State, a sovereign entity, is involved. Where there is a contract of foreign investment containing an arbitration clause, there can be little doubt that future disputes arising from the contract could be submitted to the tribunal indicated in the arbitration clause as the clause manifests the consent of the parties to such arbitration. The phenomenon that arises in modern foreign investment arbitration which involves a State as one of the parties is the claim that consent to arbitration could be created from a State’s unilateral offer of such arbitration. Such a unilateral offer could be made either through its foreign investment legislation or through the dispute resolution provision in an investment treaty.

Disasters at the local level can serve as focusing events that increase agenda attention related to disaster response, recovery, and preparedness issues. Increased agenda attention can lead to policy changes and also to learning. The degree and type of learning that occurs after a disaster within a government organization can matter to policy outcomes related to individual, household, and community-level risks and resilience. Local governments oversee disaster planning and recovery and are the first line of disaster response. They also bear the burden of performing long-term disaster recovery and planning for future events. And yet, scholars do not have a clearly articulated framework for understanding if, how, and with what effect local governments learn after a disaster strikes their community. Drawing from analyses conducted over a five-year period of multiple disaster-affected communities in Colorado, USA, a framework of learning after disaster within local governments is presented.

The expression “international arbitration” encompasses everything from historic State-to-State border disputes to routine business transactions having an international dimension (such as contracts for the transportation of goods). International commercial arbitration frequently involves State-controlled entities, and indeed a lesser but still significant number of arbitrations have been brought by foreign investors having a direct contractual relationship with a State, such as the famous Aramco case1 involving the effectiveness against Aramco of a 30-year preference granted to Aristotle Onassis by Saudi Arabia to transport oil produced in the Kingdom and AMINOIL v. Kuwait,2 which dealt with the international lawfulness of the expropriation of an important oil concession.