Converging Vocabulary, Diverging Attribution: Resilience Concepts and the Acting Subject in the National Disaster Risk Management Strategies of 25 EU Member States

ABSTRACT European disaster risk management has converged on a shared resilience vocabulary faster than on a shared account of who is expected to produce resilience. This article codes 2218 passages from 38 strategic documents in 25 EU member states along two dimensions: resilience type (engineering, ecological, transformative) and governance attribution (state‐centric, network‐based, community‐based). The object of observation is the strategy text, so the findings concern how documents attribute action, not how authority is institutionally distributed. The concept is close to settled: ecological resilience accounts for 84% of passages, and transformative framings for 3%. Attribution is not. It divides almost evenly between public authorities (46%) and cross‐sectoral networks (45%), with households, communities and volunteers named as the acting subject in fewer than one passage in 10. National profiles diverge by up to 36 percentage points, from 69% state‐centric attribution in Poland to 59% networked in Spain, along lines that cut across familiar institutional groupings. In this corpus, community attribution is about half as frequent where resilience is written into national security rather than civil protection strategies, a descriptive difference between document types that the design does not control for. None of this variation is visible to the 2023 Union Disaster Resilience Goals, whose objectives specify what a system must be able to do but not who within it is expected to act, allowing a member state to report full progress while its own strategy still casts the population as an object of protection rather than a subject of action.