The conferral of personhood is a choice made by legal systems, but just because it can be done, does not mean that it should. Analogies made between AI systems and corporations are superficial and flawed. For instance, the demand for asset partitioning does not apply to AI systems in the same way that it does with corporations and may lead to moral hazards. Conferring personhood on AI systems would also need to be accompanied with governance structures equivalent to those that accompany corporate legal personhood. Further, the metaphorical ghost of data as property needs to be exorcised.

Disaster governance is an emergent construct in disaster research. It refers to new sets of structural arrangements and processes involving coordinated decisionmaking and action involving multiple actors from government, private sector, and civil society. Disaster governance focuses on managing hazards by reducing exposure, vulnerabilities, and adverse consequences of disasters through improvements in local response capacities, resilience, and various types of assistance to affected communities post-event. The set of structural arrangements engages state actors, private sector actors such as businesses and multi-national corporations, social actors (non-governmental organizations, community-based organizations), and policy actors (advocacy groups, political actors) into an integrated network from local to global scales. The context within which disaster governance arrangements function is influenced by demographic changes, spatial and administrative scales (from local to national), and the phases of emergency management, that are in turn shaped by historical, economic, social, and political processes within and between places. Such contextual understanding explains why disaster governance often is reactive, fragmented, rarely risk-based, and lacks comprehensiveness. This chapter reviews the contextual changes and challenges affecting disaster governance in the United States from the perspective of disaster resilience and long-term recovery. It begins with a short discussion on the changing nature of disaster risk, followed by a section on the current realities of emergency management, the causes and consequences of the decline in federal capabilities, and ends with the challenges for disaster governance in 2021 and beyond.

White settlers domesticated water by shaping and regulating natural water features into systems of dams, piped networks, and waste disposal facilities. Clean water is a common resource when there is no restriction on its use, and each use of the resource makes less available to others. Overuse of common water resources was an early feature of the five cities, and effective solutions were the product of democratic institutions that empowered citizens to take collective action and express demands for improved infrastructure. In Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide, sanitary reform through investment in networked water infrastructure in response to the threat of cholera was underway by the mid-nineteenth century; the development of effective sewerage was delayed by the costs of extension across large metropolitan areas and the fragmentation of political authority between local councils. The smaller cities, Brisbane and Perth, were slower to invest, and water supplies continued to be unreliable and subject to pollution from cesspits. By the start of the twentieth century, variations in water infrastructure systems reflected the path-dependent nature of earlier solutions, which would constrain the options available to future decision makers.

Leadership and governance in Malaysia have been key to success in the planning and implementation of health services and their outcomes and in the shifts and corrections needed. Health is the responsibility of the federal government, but some areas are under the authority of state governments. The chapter illustrates how Malaysia adopted a holistic approach to health policies by embedding them in the context of national development policies. The ministry of health (MoH) is the major provider of health services. Health professionals in the MoH demonstrated leadership by advising on health priorities and taking responsibility for the formulation/implementation of intervention programmes and regulating the private health sector. They have achieved substantial balanced health development with greater equity. Analysis of the role of the MoH illustrates several essential elements of leadership. The MoH is also engaged in international health collaboration, both as a receiver of mostly technical advice from international organisations and as a giver of support to other developing countries.

The overall study evaluates the role of law in governance for social-ecological resilience with the purpose to identify matching components for legal design. In order to review resilience governance and its compatibility with law, it is necessary to define more concrete prerequisites for effective resilience governance, in short, resilience features. This chapter defines such features, reviewed in depth throughout the study. In summary, these features are adaptivity; multilevel governance; stakeholder participation; and monitoring and control. Adaptive governance is central in resilience governance. It builds on a structure that includes actors across scales, or levels, that can gather knowledge. In large-scale international systems as the legal system, this includes science. An adaptive governance system also relies on monitoring and evaluation as part of the knowledge gathering that feeds in to the system. It allows for adjustments of the measures taken and thus transformation of the system into a more resilient state.