Natural Disaster and Development in a Globalizing World

Mark Pelling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134466443
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sviluppo di business
• Index: Business

The number of humanitarian disasters triggered by a natural hazard has doubled every decade since the 1960s. At the same time, the global economic growth rate per capita is twice its 1960s value. Does this mean economic growth is independent of the impacts of natural disaster?

Natural Disaster and Development in a Globalizing World is the first book to acknowledge the full implications of globalization for disaster and development. The contributors to this book fully examine:

• global processes and how they might affect disaster risk at the global scale.
• links between international issues - such as diplomatic relations, the growth of non-governmental organizations and the health of the international insurance industry - and disaster risk
• the interaction of these large scale forces with local conditions through case study analysis of individual disaster events.

In his revealing work, author Pelling makes clear the links between global scale processes and local experiences of disaster, and underlies the difficulty of attributing blame for individual disasters on specific global pressures. He argues that action to reduce disaster must be coordinated at the local, national and global scales and that there is a need for greater integration across the physical and social sciences. In this context, the human rights agenda is seen as a way of moving disaster reduction efforts forward.

Part I

Introduction

1	Paradigms of risk
	Mark Pelling

Introduction

Court disaster long enough, and it will accept your proposal.

Mason Cooley (1927, in Andrews et al. 1996), made this statement referring to social risk, but Cooley’s observation can be applied equally well to highlight the self-destructive tendencies of recent past and contemporary human development. A cursory review of the rising numbers of people living in absolute poverty, of growing gaps between the rich and poor, of ongoing environmental degradation, globalizing consumer culture and of the global environmental impacts of industrialization, all set against the seeming lack of political and popular will for change, certainly makes it look like humanity has been courting disaster. That the average number of natural disasters reported world-wide per annum has doubled every decade since the 1960s (Pelling 2002a), suggests our proposition has been warmly accepted.

This book hopes to open up academic and policy discussions that link together local disasters and development with the processes and pressures of global change. This responds to rising economic and human losses to natural disaster, and the uncertainty of future risk scenarios under globalization (IFRC/RC 2001; IPCC 2001). The global scale of contemporary risk processes challenge disaster management in two ways. First, the motors of global change (e.g. past industrialization in North America and Europe) are often distanced in time and space from its impacts (e.g. contemporary sea-level rise and flooding in Bangladesh). Second, mitigating disaster requires co-ordination at the local, national and global scales. In this introductory chapter those elements of global change of most salience to the disaster–development relationship are identified, and two complementary schools of disaster analysis that have begun to examine the disaster–development relationship under global change are reviewed. Finally an outline for the book is presented.

Natural disaster, development and global change

Work seeking to elaborate theory and develop good practice for disaster mitigation needs to take account of the interaction of natural hazards with global level change (O’Brien and Leichenko 2000). Where should we turn to base exploratory work that aims at a critical examination of the interactions between natural disaster and development in a globalizing world? There is a useful background literature on the interaction of natural disasters and development (Hewitt 1983; Varley 1994; Lewis 1999), summarized in this volume by Maureen Fordham (Chapter 4). Also of relevance is a larger literature on links between international development and global-scale processes and change (for reviews see Waters 1994; Held and Goldblatt 1999). But it is the link between natural disasters and global change, and what this might mean for human development at a variety of scales, that has received less attention and that this book seeks in a small way to examine.

Natural disaster

Natural disaster is used here as shorthand for humanitarian disaster with a natural trigger. Whilst physical phenomena are necessary for the production of natural hazard, their translation into risk and potential for disaster is contingent upon human exposure and a lack of capacity to cope with the negative impacts that exposure might bring to individuals or human systems (Pelling 2001). There is no lower limit of loss for events that can be classified as catastrophic. Rather, reflecting the lack of any internationally agreed definition, and considering the scale effect of disaster, where considerable local loss may be insignificant at a larger scale of analysis, events are taken at their face value as reported in the academic literature, the media or by respondents.

Development

A recent definition of development presents it as ‘an economic, social and political process, which results in a cumulative rise in the perceived standard of living for an increasing proportion of a population’ (Hodder 2000: 3). But this supposes a benign physical environment, allowing a cumulative rise in the standards of living. Hewitt’s argument that ‘[i]f there could be such a thing as sustainable development, disasters would represent a major threat to it, or a sign of its failure’ (1995: 155) highlights the ability of natural disasters to set back development. In the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch in Honduras and Nicaragua, human losses and damage to physical infrastructure, housing and crops have set back development efforts by a decade or more (Bradshaw et al. 2002). Similarly, cycles of growth and recession in the global economy destabilize linear economic growth models (Wallerstein 1980). Those excluded from cycles of cumulative development include the 84 per cent of the global population living in Africa, Asia and Latin America and the substantial minority populations of the richer northern countries that have been unplugged from global circuits of accumulation and appear left behind by progress.

Disquiet about the nonlinear relationship between modern development and risk – where despite economic growth, greater levels of development can mean higher exposure to environmental hazard and potential or actual reversals in the quality of life – has generated vibrant discussion amongst sociologists, geographers and ecological economists (Beck 1992; Peet and Watts 1996; Bryant and Bailey 1997; Castree and Braun 2001). This debate hangs on the extent to which the dominant forms of modern development are to blame for increasing global inequalities in access to basic needs, in raising human exposure to environmental risk and on their social and geographical distribution. On the one hand, theorists have tried to outline ways in which economic practices contribute to climate change; for example, Mason (1997) and Robbins (1996) examined the contributions of transnational corporations. On the other hand, work has tried to identify the potential impact of climate change for individual economic sectors, particularly agriculture (Fischer et al. 1994; Reilly et al. 1994). In disasters studies, work in the neo-Marxist tradition by, for example, Susman et al. (1983) and Hewitt (1983) advanced a similar agenda, arguing that material security and prosperity for some was bought at the systemic production of greater risk exposure for others. This argument linked the political-economy roots of underdevelopment with determinants of exposure to natural disaster risk. For example, international disaster aid was critiqued for reproducing pre-disaster conditions of underdevelopment and so contributing to cycles of disaster and underdevelopment. O’Brien and Leichenko (2000) reach a similar conclusion from an assessment of the likely future impacts of global climate change and economic globalization. They suggest that many regions will experience ‘double exposure’, being both most at risk from future disaster and also unlikely to benefit from economic globalization. In this volume, Wisner (Chapter 3) extends a neo-Marxist analysis to the diverse ways that globalized forces can shape disaster risk.

Globalization

Most aspects of globalization are disputed (Giddens 1998). At a basic economic level a truly global economy has not yet emerged, with most trade continuing at the regional level, for example within the European Union (EU), and trade barriers continuing (notably excluding the importation of goods from so-called developing countries into the EU and USA), with the effect that free trade is only partial (Hirst and Thompson 1996). Politically, despite the rise of supranational actors the nation-state remains at the centre of formal development planning; but globalization in terms of increasingly global flows of people, goods and information is unquestioningly underway (Castells 1996). Growth in rates of foreign direct investment and the fluidity of money transfer brought about by electronic communications technology and labour migration are exemplars. These processes have implications for local and global development patterns and the geography of risk and disaster. Dore and Etkin (Chapter 5) examine the influence of these and other variables on the potential for countries to adapt to future natural hazard.

It should be remembered that globalization processes are nothing new for many communities and nations. Wallerstein (1980) demonstrated the worldwide reach of European economies dating to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Frank (1971) showed the inequalities inherent in such global relationships, with dominant nation-states holding the power to shape unequal trade relations and forge economic dependency amongst undeveloped economies. Such patterns of dependency have contributed to risk from natural disaster in the past and today. Pelling and Uitto (2001) point to high historical losses from isolated and ill-prepared populations exposed to hurricanes in the Lesser Antilles, but suggest that contemporary vulnerability, stemming from relative economic poverty linked to histories of colonialism and continuing inequalities in the terms of global trade, continues to exist. However, there are key differences between colonial and imperial world economies of the past and present-day globalization.

The most clearly visible difference is the impact of transport, communication and information technologies on reducing the effect of space and time as constraints on human transactions and decision-making. Giddens marked this as the defining feature of modern globalization (1990). The geographer David Harvey (1989) described this as time–space compression, a reduction in the experiential distance between different points in space. The impact of time–space compression is profound for natural disaster risk. Not only does it contribute indirectly through the (re)production of geographies of economic and social power, and hence human vulnerability across the globe and locally, but it also impacts directly through the ways in which natural disaster is perceived and responded to. Indirectly, globalization is linked to the production of vulnerability – for example, by the operation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its relationship with transnational corporations (TNCs). Chomsky (1999) argued that TNCs have their rights protected by the WTO, which is empowered to take action against states that infringe the tenets of free trade (as understood by the WTO!). In practice, Chomsky submits, this can act not only to undermine national sovereignty and the democratic process but also tends to suppress labour rights, women and children’s work codes and land reform, all of which have been shown to increase local vulnerability. Set against this negative process supporters of globalization argue that foreign direct investment and corporate social responsibility can offer a mechanism and scope for adaptation to avoid natural hazard and for enhancing local socio-economic development (DFID 2000). But this claim is not borne out by the evidence; although foreign direct investment rose from US$25 billion in 1990 to US$110 billion in 1996 just ten countries have accounted for three-quarters of all private capital flows to the developing world since 1990 (French 1998). Where international private sector operations are present they seldom become involved in activities that reduce vulnerability amongst their employees or society at large (Twigg 2001).

Beck (1992) presents an account of globalization using risk as the central organizing metaphor. He argues that in the modernization phase of development people had been prepared to ignore or accept social and ecological side effects of development in return for an improved material quality of life, but that in the present period of late modernity this preference has been undone. Beck argues that for affluent societies of the so-called developed world, risk rather than basic need fulfilment is now the central concern of individuals and policy-makers. There are a number of limitations to Beck’s Risk Society thesis (Lash et al. 1996), not least that it cannot easily be extended to cover the majority of the world’s population (in so-called developed as well as developing countries) for whom basic need fulfilment remains a priority in addition to their desire to escape environmental risk. This said, Beck does uncover the knee-jerk reflexivity of the development process to disaster with policy-makers preferring emergency response to long-term vulnerability and risk reduction measures. Beck argues that the global nature of risk requires concerted international action. Kelman (Chapter 7 in this volume) takes this argument a step further by examining the influence of natural disaster on international diplomacy and the potential for disaster events to act as bridges for building trust between previously antagonistic states.

In the social science literature globalization is often reduced to its economic, cultural or political elements and interpreted as the global spread of market liberalism and Western-style democracy. In contrast, physical science discusses the nature of global environmental change. Here (drawing on Pelling and Uitto 2001) a simple framing devise is proposed that unpacks and integrates both the human and physical components of global change. This frame incorporates observations by Kasperson et al. (1995) and Blaikie et al. (1994), who separately identified eight key global forces in the production of vulnerability: global patterns of information flow, access to the world market, urbanization, population growth, global economic pressures, environmental degradation, global environmental change and war.

Table 1.1 does not attempt to present a definitive list of gl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Global processes and environmental risk
• Part III: International exchange and vulnerability
• Part IV: Local contexts and global pressures
• Part V: Conclusion
• Index