Disaster Management

International Lessons in Risk Reduction, Response and Recovery

Alejandro Lopez-Carresi, Maureen Fordham, Ben Wisner, Ilan Kelman, Jc Gaillard, Alejandro Lopez-Carresi, Maureen Fordham, Ben Wisner, Ilan Kelman, Jc Gaillard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781849713474
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136179761
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Social Sciences

There is a perennial gap between theory and practice, between academia and active professionals in the field of disaster management. This gap means that valuable lessons are not learned and people die or suffer as a result. This book opens a dialogue between theory and practice. It offers vital lessons to practitioners from scholarship on natural hazards, disaster risk management and reduction and developments studies, opening up new insights in accessible language with practical applications. It also offers to academics the insights of the enormous experience practitioners have accumulated, highlighting gaps in research and challenging assumptions and theories against the reality of experience. Disaster Management covers issues in all phases of the disaster cycle: preparedness, prevention, response and recovery. It also addresses cross-cutting issues including political, economic and social factors that influence differential vulnerability, and key areas of practice such as vulnerability mapping, early warning, infrastructure protection, emergency management, reconstruction, health care and education, and gender issues. The team of international authors combine their years of experience in research and the field to offer vital lessons for practitioners, academics and students alike.

1 Introduction

Who, what and why

Alejandro López-Carresi, Maureen Fordham, Ben Wisner, Ilan Kelman and JC Gaillard

Who needs this book?

We have produced this book for practitioners. Too much valuable research and reflection on disaster, hazards, vulnerability, risk and risk reduction has been written in technical language and published in either expensive or obscure places, or both. The editors have worked closely with practitioners at various scales for many years, probably well over 100 years if you total up our careers. We remain closely involved with networks that include many practitioners: the Gender and Disaster Network, Many Strong Voices, the Global Network of Civil Society Organisations for Disaster Reduction, the Emergency Capacity Building (ECB) Project, Periperi U, Duryog Nivaran, the Community Based Adaptation project and the RADIX network. At a further distance, we are also engaged with the Overseas Development Institute’s (ODI) Humanitarian Practice Network, the Sphere Project and ALNAP, among others.

Recognising this gap, we tried to fill it with a book that digests research and reflection on good practice, edited specifically for practitioners. Our work was made easier by the fact that our chosen authors are to varying, but close, degrees engaged themselves with the world of practitioners – or are practitioners themselves – and come from many corners of Planet Earth.

What is a ‘practitioner’?

If we parse the term ‘practitioner’, we find many kinds of people: the policymakers, project managers, extension workers, regulators, teachers, members of scientific research councils, community leaders – all of them found at different scales of government service; the staff of civil society organisations and their volunteers and pro bono advisors that number in the tens of thousands around the world; the professionals working with international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) and the larger national non-governmental organisations (NGOs); the employees of the UN and international agencies that have ‘mud on their boots’ (or if they are now in administration, once had that mud). Bilateral and multi-lateral donor team members are also practitioners, and again, those working in the field or closely involved on a day-to-day basis with partners are most likely to enjoy and benefit from this book. So, too, perhaps, may some of the policymakers and advisors in donor headquarters, but likely not the political appointees who rule development assistance organisations (with minor exceptions).

This large cross section of people work in vastly different organisational cultures, pursue quite different careers, are younger and older, and are professionals and volunteers. Their lives differ greatly in terms of income, health care, housing, education for their children, safety of their own neighbourhoods and provision for their old age. They believe many different things about ‘life, the universe and everything’. All these characteristics affect the way such knowledge workers take up, interpret and apply new knowledge. They also affect the manner in which they search for knowledge, together with the time and resource constraints that go with their job descriptions. We have tried to take these existential realities into account in our choice of topics and authors.

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Box 1.1 Some resources for practitioners

• ALNAP (Humanitarian learning network): http://www.alnap.org

• Climate & Development Knowledge Network (CDKN):

http://www.cdkn.org

• Community Based Adaptation project:

http://www.iied.org/cba7-seventh-international-conference-community-based-adaptation/

• Duryog Nivaran (South Asian practice network):

http://www.duryognivaran.org/

• Emergency Capacity Building (ECB) Project:

http://www.ecbproject.org/resources/resources-and-learning/

• Gender and Disaster Network:

http://www.gdnonline.org/

• Global Network of Civil Society Organisations for Disaster Reduction:

http://www.globalnetwork-dr.org/

• La Red (Latin American practice network):

http://www.desenredando.org/

• Many Strong Voices:

http://www.manystrongvoices.org/

• ODI’s Humanitarian Practice Network:

http://www.odihpn.org/

• Periperi U (African practice network):

http://riskreductionafrica.org/en/home

• RADIX network:

http://www.radixonline.org/

• Sphere Project:

http://www.sphereproject.org/

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The Drum Beat Network (2012) has carried out large surveys of development practitioners in order to find out what sources of knowledge they use. The results show that that they tap a wide variety of sources and that the gap between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ or between ‘academia’ and ‘the real world’ is not as great as some might think. Some 1183 people completed the 2012 survey, from over 200 different agencies. Respondents included people with 121 nationalities, based in 115 different countries and covered a full range of primary job functions – with five roles having over 100 respondents: executive or decision-making; information or knowledge management; programme communication; programme management; and research or technical work. There was a good spread of primary areas of work – with the five top roles being health, education, governance, social and economic policy and gender.

In answer to the question: ‘How do you keep up to date with the latest developments in your field?’, more than 50 per cent replied: publications, colleagues within and outside my organ isa tion and professional conferences. The survey further asked: ‘Outside your organisation what kinds of professionals are you most in contact with?’ Top of the list were: academics and technical experts (72 per cent), communication professionals (53 per cent), programme managers (53 per cent), and community or civil society leaders (51 per cent).

Other audiences for this book

We also think researchers and students will find this book useful: in particular, academics who are part of a rising wave of interest in interdisciplinary approaches to human development, security, environmental management, hazards, risk and disaster. Communication across and among disciplines has been made easier with the increased funding of teams that work hard to understand one another’s language and approach to problems such as the ones just listed. This book can, among other things, help to encourage and validate such team approaches. However, our aim is more ambitious: it is also to encourage a young cohort of ‘engaged’ academics.

While our primary audience is those knowledge workers described above, we recognise as well that in the twenty-first century the ‘engaged’ scholar, researcher and academic is becoming an increasingly common figure. ‘Engaged’ has a meaning that overlaps somewhat with the more common term, ‘applied’. In many disciplines inheriting their power structures and cultures from earlier centuries, ‘applied’ work is still considered second class, something that ranks ‘below’ highly theorised contributions and ‘pure’ science that are published in the ‘top ranking’ journals and earn for their authors recognition and job security. While this archaic bias persists, increasingly some have simply ignored that polarity and defined themselves as ‘engaged’. This term describes researchers and scholars (outside as well as inside the academy) who have a long-term relationship of mutual respect and trust with people in communities and institutions with whom the engaged researcher co-produces knowledge. Taking such a stance, attempting to ‘walk in the shoes’ (or rubber sandals) of her/his interlocutor, the engaged knowledge worker must adopt methods and frameworks that break down disciplinary and professional silos. As Marcus Oxley, coordinator of the GNDR (Global Network of Civil Society Organisations for Disaster Reduction) has put it: in villages and urban neighbourhoods, people conceive problems, threats and opportunities holistically.

Why is this book necessary?

Confronting the new normal without comforting rhetoric

In the shabby tradition of political rhetoric that has promised ‘no child shall go hungry’ (Henry Kissinger in 1975) and ‘health for all by the year 2000’ (World Health Organization), the Hyogo Framework for Action’s (HFA) expected outcome was ‘The substantial reduction of disaster losses, in lives and in the social, economic and environmental assets of communities and countries’ by 2015 (UNISDR, 2005:3). The midterm assessment of the HFA and subsequent reports show that the world cannot expect such a reduction (UNISDR 2011). On the contrary, the mounting evidence suggests that, notwithstanding many solid initiatives from community teams to national legislation, vulnerabilities continue to increase.

Sorting through the statistics is not an easy task, because for comparisons to be made across years, the changing baselines must be taken into account. That is, populations, communities and infrastructure are not the same from year to year. So the Emergency Events Database EM-DAT (http://www.emdat.be) reports that from 2005–2011, the number of deaths from disasters involving environmental events decreased from 2005–2007, jumped significantly in 2008, was extremely low in 2009, spiked in 2010, and dropped again in 2011. Specific disasters made a big difference, such as the 2008 earthquake in China just nine days after Cyclone Nargis struck Burma – with each event causing tens of thousands of deaths.

The events which cause the spikes are not the anomalies. Instead, they are symptomatic of the systemic vulnerability existing around the world, indicating major disasters just waiting to happen. This ‘new normal’ – or, in reality, not so new – is one of precarious existence for a large part of humanity produced by the negative, worsening influence of multiple crises: violence of all kinds, climate change, unplanned urbanisation, polarisation between rich and poor, corruption and bad government practice and the instability of a globalised economy. This means that disaster management and disaster risk reduction (DRR) cannot be seen as ‘technical’ matters. They are deeply political. Figure 1.1 suggests a wide range of interconnected processes at work that combine to produce and reproduce, generation after generation, conditions in which marginal people are allocated to marginal places; the weakest in society are placed in harm’s way, usually not through their own choices.

Figure 1.1 Spaghetti of doom: some complex interactions that link the dominant development approach to marginalisation and the creation of disaster risk

The challenges apply to rich locations as well. The USA lacks neither wealth nor power, yet chooses and perpetuates allocations of that wealth and power that create and continue vulnerability. What can a disaster manager practitioner do against the long-standing system in Figure 1.1 that encourages the destruction of wetlands along Louisiana’s shoreline and forces poor peop...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations and acronyms
• 1. Introduction: who, what and why
• Part I: Prevention and risk reduction
• Part II: Response and recovery
• Part III: Regional perspectives
• Part IV: Tools
• Glossary
• Index