Summary: The Transdisciplinary Integrative Vulnerability and Resilience Assessment (TIV) developed by the Disaster Research Unit is a fundamental methodology and method which has derived from various sociological approaches and constantly been refined ever since. It serves as a counter model to established vulnerability and resilience assessments, which either descriptively / quantitatively determine vulnerabi lity and resilience top- down or carry out a participative bottom -up assessment together with those potentially affected. TIV combines both approaches and focusses on an iterative process in which the results obtained are continuously discussed and evaluated with experts, the general public, organizations, etc., in order to ensure a common and milieu-sensitive assessment. This working paper first defines "transdisciplinarity" and outlines the current state of research followed by a presentation of selected vulnerability and resilience assessments that form the basis for TIV, or where TIV goes beyond them. Then TIV itself and its methodological, methodical and contentbased approaches are presented.
