This research will draw lessons for the design of United States' hazard policies from experiences in Australia and New Zealand with cooperative approaches to hazard mitigation. The research foci are the merits-based hazard mitigation policies in New South Wales, Australia and cooperative hazards planning in New Zealand. Experiences with these cooperative regulatory policies and their lessons for the United States are to be examined through collaborative study by American, Australian, and New Zealand researchers. The research objectives are to: (1) document the strengths and limitations of cooperative regulatory provisions as implemented for selected hazards policies in Australia and New Zealand; (2) compare the performance of cooperative regulatory provisions for selected policies in Australia and New Zealand with a parallel set of research results in the United States; and (3) assess the implications of these findings for future regulatory provisions as part of U.S. earthquake and other hazards policies.
