Dr Clara Egger, Assistant Professor of Global Governance at Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences (ESSB), has been awarded an NWO XS grant for her research on disaster law.

Egger received the grant for her DisLex project. Egger: ‘Strengthening the resilience of our societies to disasters is a global goal. Key to resilience is legal preparedness, namely the adoption of disaster law that organizes effective disaster response while safeguarding human rights and democratic governance. Despite international guidelines on how to best design such laws, little is known about the quality of disaster law worldwide.’

DisLex fills this gap by using computational text analysis methods to create the first dataset comparing the features of disaster law in 100 countries over 10 years (2013-2023). DisLex will open new research avenues on the impact of legal preparedness on disaster resilience.