Why Vulnerability Still Matters

The Politics of Disaster Risk Creation

Greg Bankoff, Dorothea Hilhorst, Greg Bankoff, Dorothea Hilhorst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032113432
• eBook ISBN: 9781000570991
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

We think vulnerability still matters when considering how people are put at risk from hazards and this book shows why in a series of thematic chapters and case studies written by eminent disaster studies scholars that deal with the politics of disaster risk creation: precarity, conflict, and climate change.

The chapters highlight different aspects of vulnerability and disaster risk creation, placing the stress rightly on what causes disasters and explaining the politics of how they are created through a combination of human interference with natural processes, the social production of vulnerability, and the neglect of response capacities. Importantly, too, the book provides a platform for many of those most prominently involved in launching disaster studies as a social discipline to reflect on developments over the past 50 years and to comment on current trends.

The interdisciplinary and historical perspective that this book provides will appeal to scholars and practitioners at both the national and international level seeking to study, develop, and support effective social protection strategies to prevent or mitigate the effects of hazards on vulnerable populations. It will also prove an invaluable reference work for students and all those interested in the future safety of the world we live in.

1 Introduction Why vulnerability still matters¹

Dorothea Hilhorst and Greg Bankoff

DOI: 10.4324/9781003219453-1

We think vulnerability still matters or, at least, we think it matters to ask the question of whether it still matters. Vulnerability has been the key concept of disaster studies for a long time. What may be dubbed the ‘iron law’ of disaster studies stipulates that disasters cannot be equated to the hazard (Wisner et al. 2012), but are the outcome of hazards encountering vulnerability, mitigated by response capacities (Wisner et al. 2004). Whether a disaster unfolds as a consequence of an earthquake, for example, depends on poverty levels in the population and the state of the built environment (Kelman 2020; Wisner et al. 2012). The power of the concept of vulnerability has been that it explains the differentiated impact of hazards and highlights the socially constructed nature of vulnerability – and hence of disasters – as produced by politics, economic processes, and social exclusion (Bankoff et al. 2004).

However, since the turn of the millennium, the central status of vulnerability has been largely overtaken by another concept, namely resilience. The UNDRR defines resilience as the ability of a system, community, or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate, adapt to, transform, and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner. Resilience has been welcomed because it focuses on people’s agency and the capabilities of communities to withstand disaster rather than the supposed passivity associated with the term vulnerability. It was seen as the flipside of vulnerability: the less vulnerable the more resilient and vice versa. Nonetheless, the authors in this volume think the term vulnerability matters. We believe that case analyses informed by vulnerability lead to radically different political outcomes than approaching the same cases from a lens of resilience.

Nearly 20 years ago, a group of concerned scholars, motivated by a shared commitment to improving people’s ability to resist disasters, came together in a workshop to discuss the utility of vulnerability as both a conceptual and methodological tool. That workshop led to the publication of Mapping Vulnerability: Disaster, Development and People in 2004. In it, the authors stress the social production of vulnerability, or how the relative position of advantage or disadvantage that a particular group holds within a society’s social order, renders it unsafe. Many things have changed since then and particularly since vulnerability first became popularised as a term in the 1970s – both in the world and about how we think about the world.

For a start, it is a very different world now, politically, with the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union. The liberal institutions upon which the post-World War II international system was built, the so-called Bretton Woods agreement, is bursting at the seams to accommodate the rise of new nationalisms. Inequality within and between nations has increased as the gap between rich and poor has widened in the last 30 years (Freeland 2012). The workplace, too, is not the same with the casualisation of employment and the rise of zero-hours contracts. Actually, of course, these conditions have long been the norm in lower- and middle-income countries (LMICs), and the novelty is in their application to the hitherto largely protected labouring classes of the industrialised world. Over the last 20 years, disasters have become more frequent and wrought greater impact. Disasters claimed approximately 1.23 million lives, affected over 4 billion people, and led to about US$ 2.97 trillion in economic losses worldwide between 2000 and 2019 (UNDRR 2020). Climate change has become the central focus of our concern. Indeed, the present age has even been renamed the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000).

At the same time, people have begun to be considered not just as vulnerable, a condition seen as emphasising their frailties, but also as resilient, with the capacities to organise, resist, learn, change, and adapt. In fact, the latter, adaptation, has become the slogan and the solution of just how human systems need to adjust to actual or expected climatic stimuli. While vulnerability has certainly not disappeared from the global political and conceptual arena, its influence over the way that disasters are thought about and managed has waned considerably in recent years.

We think it’s time to re-centre the debate on vulnerability and the processes that continue to make or are even creating new risks for peoples and societies. Resilience and adaptation are welcome additions in understanding disaster risk reduction, but they also serve (and have been used as such) to distract attention from certain key issues. Resilience can be used to mask social inequalities and absolve states from their duty of care, and adaptation runs the risk of blaming disasters on nature once again and returning to an older and all too familiar hazard-focused trope. Vulnerability still places the stress where it rightly should be – on the processes (political, social, economic, and environmental) that put people at risk (Cannon, this volume). It is time to restate this and, at the same time, perhaps, expand on our earlier conceptualisations. As the world changes, do we need to rethink what vulnerability means and how we apply it? Hence, a second workshop and a second volume, that includes some of the original contributors, to see how their ideas have changed, as well as to give space to fresh voices that may see vulnerability through new eyes and from alternate perspectives.

Why vulnerability still matters

Vulnerability, when it was first proposed, was a novel way of understanding why disasters happen and who was hurt by them. It was also a critique of the political and socio-economic systems that produced them. Its proponents implicitly blamed disasters on the legacy of colonialism and the neo-colonial forms of domination exercised by western governments and transnational corporations over the newly independent nation-states of the now denominated Third World (O’Keefe, Westgate, and Wisner 1976; Watts 1983). Without overtly taking sides in the Cold War debates between capitalism and communism, though some scholars came close to an ideological position (Cannon 1994), the proponents of vulnerability confined their criticisms to the practices of transnational capital and the unfavourable terms of trade they imposed upon poorer nations. They argued that communities were rendered unsafe by the relative position of advantage or disadvantage that particular groups occupied within a society’s social order (Hewitt 1997, 141). Vulnerable people were at risk, not simply because they were exposed to hazard, but as a direct result of a combination of variables such as class, caste, ethnicity, age, gender, and disability (Wisner 1993, 131–133) that determined people’s entitlements and affected their command over basic necessities and rights (Hewitt 1997, 143–151; Watts 1993, 118–120). Vulnerability became the defining conceptual framework through which disasters were understood, an approach embodied in the publication of At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability and Disasters in 1994, and gained widespread acceptance with the UN’s adoption of Resolution 44/236 (22 December 1989) declaring An International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction beginning on 1 January 1990.

Today, however, we live in a different world. Just how different a world is one of the main issues addressed by the authors in this book. Much has changed since the 1970s. Politically, the Cold War has ended – or was at least suspended – with the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the entire international system, the Three Worlds model, upon which it was based (Bankoff, this volume). This categorisation cast countries as either capitalist, industrial, and sharing similar plural political institutions (First World), or as one-party states with industrial or rapidly industrialising centrally planned economic systems (Second World). All other countries were designated as Third World, a highly diverse mix of states culturally and economically whose unifying factor was their complete lack of international influence (Harris, More, and Schmitz 2009, 11).

This tripartite division of the world was coined by Alfred Sauvy, a French demographer and economic historian, who identified the Third World with underdevelopment (Sauvy 1952). If this categorisation was initially based on political distinctions, over time, it increasingly came to signify economic differentiation too. Moreover, these same regions were also those most associated with the occurrence of what were labelled at the time as ‘natural disasters’ (Bankoff 2001). As the Second World faded into oblivion post-1991, the residual categorisation simply denoted the difference between developed and developing nations: rich and poor, North and South, HICs (high-income countries) and LMICs. Now, it is argued that these ‘old labels’ no longer serve a useful purpose in summarising either the structural characteristics of national economies or the patterns of interaction between contemporary states. Even the distinction between HICs and LMICs has become increasingly tenuous given the expansion of the number of countries that do not fit into either designation, some of which, such as Russia and China, are regarded as ‘poor and powerful, having middle to low incomes but fast-growing economies and considerable geopolitical influence’ (Harris, More, and Schmitz 2009, 14).

Socially, too, the world is a very different place than it was in the 1970s. A new class-in-the-making is emerging out of the neoliberalism that underpins the globalisation of the last 30 years – the precariat. It consists, according to Guy Standing (2011), of ‘a multitude of insecure people, living bits-and-pieces lives, in and out of short-term jobs, without a narrative of occupational development’. It includes under- or unemployed educated youth, growing numbers of the criminalised, those categorised as disabled, and migrants in their hundreds of millions around the world. It also includes women abused in oppressive labour (Bradshaw et al this volume).

This class has long been in the making in LMICs where the industrial revolution proved to be not so much a stage in the modernisation narrative as a myth that came and went in a single lifetime (Ferguson 1999). The decline in living standards and the rise in poverty levels which accompanied the neoliberal structural adjustment policies of the 1980s/90s in many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union represented a humiliating process of expulsion from the development process, an ‘abjection’ where the term implied not simply being cast aside but being thrown down as well (Ferguson 2007). What is new, however, is the growth of the precariat in HICs, particularly following the banking crisis of 2007 (Hewitt, this volume). The shock to the financial system gave employers an opportunity to dismiss permanent salaried staff and replace them with new labour arrangements. It also allowed the state to ‘reform’ welfare benefits. Subsequently, there has been a rise in the number of temporary and agency labour, outsourcing, occupational dismantling, and the abandonment of non-wage benefits by firms, while governments have acted swiftly to erode state benefits and pensions (Standing 2014, 43–99).

A significant proportion of the precariat is the number of forcibly displaced people, currently estimated at 79.5 million worldwide. These are individuals forced from their homes due to persecution, conflict, and human rights violations. Most are IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons), people forcibly uprooted but who remain inside their own country. An increasingly large proportion, however, are refugees (29.6 million in 2020), displaced persons who have crossed international frontiers and who are currently residing in a state in which they cannot claim citizenship (UNHCR 2020). These are persons fleeing conflict and/or persecution in their own country. Added to these is the much larger number of economic migrants, people fleeing destitution and environmental degradation, estimated now at more than 272 million or 3.5 per cent of the world’s population (IOM 2020, 2). By abjuring their citizenship and abandoning their state, these transboundary migrants lose their political status. As ‘non-citizens’, they inhabit an indeterminate zone of disorder and chaos where the normal rules of play do not apply. Currently, only one-third of migrants leave poor countries for rich ones, but migration patterns seem set to change in the decades ahead, driving more people to seek shelter in temperate zones where the effects of climate anomalies are considered less severe (White 2011). Like the precariat of which they are part, migrants are very vulnerable to the impact of environmental change and natural hazards.

But, perhaps, the biggest change in the last 50 years has been environmental. Climate change, only a distant rumble in the 1970s, is now a real and pressing concern. Overwhelming scientific evidence supports the conclusion that human activity is changing the climate and will continue to affect it for hundreds if not thousands of years to come. World temperatures have fluctuated in the past, but it is estimated that at no time in the last 800,000 years have concentrations of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide) been so high as they are today (Giddens 2014, 12; World Bank 2015, 16). While a significant minority of sceptics remain in some countries (Buchholtz 2020), the current debate is more about whether climate change is gradual, allow...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Routledge Studies in Hazards, Disaster Risk and Climate Change
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Why vulnerability still matters
• Part I Why vulnerability still matters
• Part II Vulnerability, conflict, and state–society relations
• Part III Disaster risk creation
• Index