Disasters Without Borders

The International Politics of Natural Disasters

John Hannigan

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745650692, 9780745650685
• eBook ISBN: 9780745663111
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Economics

Dramatic scenes of devastation and suffering caused by disasters such as the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami, are viewed with shock and horror by millions of us across the world. What we rarely see, however, are the international politics of disaster aid, mitigation and prevention that condition the collective response to natural catastrophes around the world. In this book, respected Canadian environmental sociologist John Hannigan argues that the global community of nations has failed time and again in establishing an effective and binding multilateral mechanism for coping with disasters, especially in the more vulnerable countries of the South.

Written in an accessible and even-handed manner, Disasters without Borders it is the first comprehensive account of the key milestones, debates, controversies and research relating to the international politics of natural disasters. Tracing the historical evolution of this policy field from its humanitarian origins in WWI right up to current efforts to cast climate change as the prime global driver of disaster risk, it highlights the ongoing mismatch between the way disaster has been conceptualised and the institutional architecture in place to manage it. The book's bold conclusion predicts the confluence of four emerging trends - politicisation/militarisation, catastrophic scenario building, privatisation of risk, and quantification, which could create a new system of disaster management wherein 'insurance logic' will replace humanitarian concern as the guiding principle. 

Disasters Without Borders is an ideal introductory text for students, lecturers and practitioners in the fields of international development studies, disaster management, politics and international affairs, and environmental geography/sociology.

CHAPTER ONE

The Disaster Politics Nexus

As the second decade of the new millennium dawned, a plague of natural hazards visited the Southern hemisphere, triggering multiple disasters. From early December 2010 to mid-January 2011, heavy rainstorms and flash floods – an “inland instant tsunami” – swept across the Australian state of Queensland, spreading over an area the size of France and Germany combined (Rourke, 2011). The flooding obliterated small towns in the Lockyer Valley and overwhelmed low-lying suburbs and parts of the central business district in Brisbane, Australia’s third largest city. This followed earlier flooding in the northeast part of the state that resulted in an estimated C$1 billion in lost agricultural production.

During the flood emergency period, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard was criticized in the media for appearing stiff and emotionally distant from the problems confronting disaster victims. By contrast, Queensland State Premier Anna Bligh, a descendant of Captain William Bligh of Mutiny on the Bounty fame, was praised for striking the right note of steady determination. Bligh saw her public approval rating skyrocket from 25 percent in November to 83 percent in mid-January (Dagge, 2011).

After the waters subsided, Gillard introduced a legislative package that included a temporary flood tax levy on higher income earners, the promise of fast visa processing for skilled migrants wanting to work on the reconstruction, and a A$2 billion payment to the Queensland state government. The third of these ignited a political firestorm, especially among members of the Australian Greens Party. To raise extra money for disaster relief, Gillard proposed abolishing various environmental programs: cleaner automobile initiatives, solar rebates, and the establishment of a Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute. Speaking on Radio Australia, Richard Denniss, director of The Australia Institute, a progressive think tank, opined that Gillard was probably using the Queensland disaster as a smoke screen for getting out of carbon abatement policies that were ineffective, poorly designed, and had been widely criticized (ABC International/Radio Australia, 2011).

In a mountainous tourist region an hour’s drive from Rio de Janeiro, devastating flooding and mudslides precipitated by heavy rains buried several towns, killing over 700 and leaving more than 15,000 homeless. According to the daily newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo, this was the worst natural disaster to hit Brazil in four decades (RTE, 2011). Recalling all too well the political fallout from President José Sarney’s reluctance to conduct an on-site inspection of Rio’s slums in the 1988 floods (see chapter 6), newly elected president Dilma Rousseff – in only her second week in office – donned black rubber boots to walk the streets of Nova Friburgo, one of the worst impacted communities, and pledged “firm action.”

Official response to the disaster played out politically in the context of international pressure to ensure safe and adequate facilities for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympic Games. As the Homeland Security News Wire (2011), an American e-information service, points out, “Should a disaster strike during one of these events, the response by the Brazilian government could have the potential to create an international incident.” A second Brazilian daily newspaper, Estado de S. Paulo, questioned Brazil’s ability to successfully stage these mega-events given its poor track record, “A look at public policy … or the lack thereof … reveals a long chain of unpreparedness, administrative incompetence, technical incapacity, and political irresponsibility” (cited in Hake, 2011). Rousseff, who was attempting to secure finance for a major upgrade to Brazil’s infrastructure in time for the World Cup, readily acknowledged that this was “not only a natural disaster” but a problem caused by irregular land occupation and reckless development, “Housing in risky areas has become the norm in Brazil and no longer the exception” (Fick and Prada, 2011).

In this book, I view disaster events such as those that have recently plagued Australia and Brazil through the lens of international politics. Surprisingly, this analytic perspective has been slow to develop. With some notable exceptions, political theorists and researchers interested in global affairs have not traditionally been involved in doing disaster studies (McEntire, 2005: 2). This is indicative of political science and international affairs in general, where disaster research has tended to be marginalized and largely invisible. Those political scientists who are active in the disaster research field tend to publish in specialized places, and focus primarily on security and terrorism issues. This contrasts with several other social science disciplines, notably anthropology, geography, and sociology, where research on disasters has been published both in leading journals and annuals, as well as in multidisciplinary journals such as Disasters since the 1970s. To be fair, there is an extensive literature dealing with the history and politics of humanitarianism. Natural disasters are often included here, but not always distinguished from other emergencies such as civil war.

Rather than just a matter of benign neglect, there are more complex reasons why the disaster-politics nexus was overlooked until relatively recently. Of particular importance is the tendency to treat disaster and disaster response as essentially non-political in nature, or at least ideally so. Disasters are depicted as occurring in a liminal space beyond the pale of normal politics. There are two versions of this, one applicable primarily to community disasters in America, the other to international disaster management.

Post-disaster Utopia and the Altruistic Community

In the 1950s and 1960s, North American disaster researchers routinely characterized the period immediately following the impact of a flood, tornado, hurricane, or other natural disaster as a time of community consensus and solidarity where partisan conflict and political dealing are temporarily suspended. People are said to roll up their sleeves, pull together, and put prior political and social divisions on the shelf. This is sometimes described as a post-disaster utopia, wherein formal rules and regulations are set aside, the usual distinctions between rich and poor are disregarded, and people feel an unselfish concern for the welfare of others. Especially influential has been sociologist Alan Barton’s (1969) concept of the “altruistic community,” the tendency of citizens to selflessly help others in the immediate aftermath of a tornado, hurricane, or flood. As such, natural disasters are viewed as a “consensus-type crisis” with only limited long-term trauma for its victims (Picou et al., 2004: 1495).

This period is distinguished by the emergence of what Taylor et al. (1970) call “the ephemeral government.” By this they mean a period of radical revision where one finds “an ephemeral governing structure, different in form, action, and capability from that which had gone before” (1970: 129). In their case history of a tornado that struck Topeka, Kansas on June 8, 1966, the researchers found that community leaders, ordinarily unrelated in any formal sense, came together quickly to plan, coordinate, and expedite effective action, only to disband when the period of crisis ended.

According to this explanation, as the disaster impact recedes, the divergence of interests typical of everyday community life slowly reappears, especially with reference to the politics of reconstruction and the allocation of emergency relief (Quarantelli and Dynes, 1976; Hannigan, 1976). In contrast to sharing of common tasks during the utopian period, the long-term tasks of recovery require “a specialized bureaucracy with specialized roles and rationalized procedures – insurance adjusters, claim investigators, street crews and so forth” (Taylor et al., 1970: 160). This usually creates disillusion, strain, and conflict.

In her best-selling book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, Rebecca Solnit (2009) revives and modifies this notion of the post-disaster utopia. Solnit, a San Francisco writer and activist, believes that calamity brings out the best in people and provides a common purpose. “In the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, or a major storm,” she says, “most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors as well as friends and loved ones” (Solnit, 2009: 2).

Solnit introduces a second, related idea in her book. Not only is the immediate post-disaster period characterized by selflessness and consensus, but it also represents a time of extraordinary innovation and grassroots democracy. Solnit mixes Barton’s “altruistic community” and Taylor’s “ephemeral government” with the contemporary idea of “civil society,” yielding a utopian notion of an emergent, temporary, disaster society that operates outside of institutional politics and constitutes “the acting decision-making body – as democracy has always promised and rarely delivered” (2009: 305). If anyone can be found to be behaving badly here, it is the community “elites” and their foot soldiers (politicians, bureaucrats, police, firefighters, soldiers), who “panic” because they sense that their legitimacy and power are being undermined.¹ In proposing this contemporary version of an emergent disaster community outside the limits of normal politics, Solnit is clearly reacting to events following Hurricane Katrina.

As I discuss in chapter 6, radical political and social change as a direct consequence of natural disaster is relatively rare, and even then most often occurs where disasters act as a catalyst of processes already under way. Solnit’s claim that a kind of “Arab Spring” spontaneously arises among disaster victims is more boilerplate than reality.

De-politicizing Emergencies

In the arena of international affairs, the historical reluctance of sovereign states to engage directly with disaster relief and governance beyond their borders has created the impression that such activities effectively lie beyond the limits of normal politics and legal jurisdiction. Fidler (2005) contrasts the extensive use of international law in the contexts of war, epidemics, and industrial accidents to its almost total absence in peacetime natural disasters. He describes the latter as episodic and short-lived with minimal impact on the material interests of national states in the theater of international relations. Whereas the international response to wars, epidemics, and accidents is based in “hard law” (multilateral treaties), the center of gravity in disaster response is situated in “soft law,” that is, the non-binding actions and activities of international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs).

Citing an alleged comment by the late Maurice Williams, a US presidential coordinator for major disaster relief efforts before heading up the United Nations World Food Council, that “disaster relief is above politics,” Kent (1983: 708) observes that disaster relief is rarely regarded by practicing diplomats as a political weapon that can be utilized to gain advantages over an adversary or serve geopolitical interests. Three decades later, Williams’ comment seems naïve and out-of-date, but it does point to one reason why the political dynamics of disaster was previously downplayed in the study and interpretation of world affairs.

In the 2004 Sorokin Lecture, presented at the University of Saskatchewan (Canada), sociologist Craig Calhoun argues that a discourse of emergencies is now central to international affairs. The term “emergency,” Calhoun says, implies that a well-oiled, smoothly functioning normal system of global processes in which business, politics, and the weather all interact properly occasionally goes off the rails. When this happens, quick action is recommended in order to restore equilibrium, ideally through external intervention. International emergencies “both can and should be managed” (2004: 375). This “managerial” perspective is de-politicizing, Calhoun believes, because it skirts democratic decision making. So too is a humanitarian response, insomuch as it “involves precisely trying to alleviate suffering without regard to political identities or actions of those in need” (Calhoun, 2004: 392). Calhoun is not suggesting that this “emergency thinking” is inherently apolitical, but that an emergency informs both managerial and humanitarian perspectives in a way that conjures up the illusion of being situated outside of “normal” politics.

The illusion that natural disasters lie beyond the purview of normal politics has been officially acknowledged by humanitarian agencies, permitted to deliver aid only on the assurance that they remain strictly neutral. This prohibition is enforced both by the United Nations² and by individual nation states. In its “Code of Conduct for NGOs in Disaster Relief,” the International Red Cross/Red Crescent stipulated, “When we give humanitarian aid, it is not partisan or political and should not be viewed as such.” Note, however, that this position increasingly came under fire after the end of the Cold War, “when the political causes of many emergencies were more widely and openly acknowledged” (Buchanan-Smith, 2003: 6).

Nevertheless, some elements within the humanitarian aid community continue to have a marked aversion to all things political, which they equate with “nonfeasance, malfeasance, incompetence, corruption and/or obstructionism” (Drury et al., 2005: 454). Ironically, the agencies and institutions with whom these humanitarian NGOs must regularly deal rarely hesitate to take a political stance. Kent (1987: 118) cites a vignette in which former UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim recalls, “Four years ago (1974) I believed that humanitarian relief was above politics. Now I know that humanitarian relief is politics.” Among others, the UN, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and USAID (United States Agency for International Development) all link their political objectives to interventions in humanitarian disasters. Middleton and O’Keefe (1998: 157) describe this as being both paradoxical and problematic:

Yet many INGOs, including some who work with one or more of these and similar institutions, seem to regard what they do as somehow apolitical, as having no political agenda of its own, or even, except by accident, of having no political effects. Their philanthropic ancestry, their close connections with “donor” governments, their disbarment from overtly political activity within their parent countries, their existence within that culture of political world-weariness all conspire towards this self-defensive, but ultimately irresponsible reaction.

At the same time, individual practitioners working for humanitarian agencies usually come to accept that politics is central to disasters and that neutrality is largely a mirage. As Nick Leader (1999) points out, “A recent study of British agencies reported that the Red Cross/NGO code, a short and general code, is a statement which has ‘not been internalised by organisations and remains unused as a means of guiding and auditing their work.’ ” As one referee for the manuscript of this book commented, “I think this [the belief that disasters are apolitical] is a very rare view indeed … it’s long been accepted that weak governance underpins almost all disaster.” Nonetheless, disaster managers are usually smart enough to recognize that articulating an apolitical or neutral position facilitates cooperation with host governments, whereas a more politicized approach might jeopardize it. Thus, humanitarianism “is a form of politics in which it is useful to assert that one is non-political” (Volberg, 2005/2006: 63).

It’s fair to say, I think, that those who affirm the apolitical dimension of natural disasters are not so much stating that this is actually the case so much as they are expressing the fervent wish that it might be so. As Drury and Olson (1998: 153) observe, “Indeed, the end argument for most practitioners as well as academics concerned with disasters and disaster response is essentially normative: In this dominant outlook, it is expected that disaster management be apolitical or at least as non-political as possible.”

The Disaster–Politics Nexus

Alas, there is a wide gap between what should be and what is. “Every scholarly study of disasters documents that prevention, preparedness and response are determined by political factors,” insists Alex de Waal (2006: 129), a veteran observer of famines and other slow-onset crises in sub-Saharan Africa. His observation is echoed by numerous other disaster practitioners and scholars of sundry ideological and methodological stripes. Fuentes (2009: 100) describes post-disaster reconstruction as “fundamentally a political event that can have very discernible political outcomes.” Kathleen Tierney (2008: 135), a leading American sociologist of disaster, observes, “Disaster scholarship has long noted that decisions regarding hazard and disaster management are fundamentally political.” Political forces, she explains, drive decision making across the entire hazard/disaster spectrum: framing hazards as social problems requiring governmental intervention, political agenda-setting, crisis planning and response, the issuance of presidential disaster declaration, and the provision of disaster assistance. Lee Clarke (2006: 101), an expert in the study of risk communication, argues that politics and power are intertwined; and power “is exceedingly important in talk about disaster, the production of disaster, responses to disaster, and how people make sense of disasters after they happen.” Rather than temporarily receding during disasters, social conflict and political struggle are part of the fabric of disasters. Based on her participant observation and in-depth interviews with international aid workers, government officials, and local NGO representatives in Aceh, Indonesia several years after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, Lisa Smirl (2008: 236) concludes, “Humanitarian reconstruction after a large-scale natural disaster has become a key site of international politics; a site where global assumptions, relationships, and responsibilities are negotiated, solidified and questioned.” This being so, there is considerably less consensus over the breadth, strength and direction of the link between politics and disasters. Essentially, there are two versions of this relationship.

According to the more moderate version, politics and disaster are frequently intertwined, but one should never assume a cause and effect relationship. Thus, in a Harvard Business School working paper, Cohen and Werker (2008: 2) argue that natural disasters aren’t exclusively driven by politics, but neither are they immune; rather, disasters occur in a political space. In similar fashion, Welsh (1996: 409–10) proposes that the environment “needs to be understood as a site within which a number of social, cultural, economic and political forces intersect, compete and co-operate.”

In this spirit, economists, political scientists and public policy researchers have privileged an approach that treats disasters as a space/site/sphere within which political activity occurs. In an early example, Abney and Hill (1966) studied the effect of Hurricane Betsy on voting in the 1962 city election in New Orleans (they found that the hurricane was not a decisive factor in voting decisions, with “wet” precincts no more likely than “dry” ones to vote against the incumbent mayor). In Disasters and Democracy: The Politics of Extreme Natural Events (1999), one of the better known books on this topic prior to Hurricane Katrina, Rutherford Platt, a geographer and land use lawyer specializing in public policy concerning urban land and water resources, spotlights the increasing involvement of the US government in domestic disasters. By being overly eager to issue a presidential declaration of a “major disaster,” thereby making the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgments
• Glossary of Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Text Boxes
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE: The Disaster Politics Nexus
• CHAPTER TWO: The Global Policy Field of Natural Disasters
• CHAPTER THREE: The Kindness of Strangers
• CHAPTER FOUR: A Safer World?
• CHAPTER FIVE: Climate of Concern
• CHAPTER SIX: Disaster Politics as Game Playing
• CHAPTER SEVEN: Mass Media and the Politics of Disaster
• CHAPTER EIGHT: Disaster Politics: A Discursive Approach
• CHAPTER NINE: Conclusion
• References
• Index