Disaster Management, Sustainability, and Globalization: An Integrative Planetary Approach

Abstract

This article probes into the reasons why the discipline of "disaster management" failed to anticipate and prepare for the organizational and social consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic in spite of frequent warnings of an impending pandemic by epidemiologists. The article argues that the severity of this failure can only be remedied by breaking out of the discipline's insularity and opening it up to different intellectual crosscurrents from across the entire spectrum of knowledge. It begins by locating the idea of "disaster" within a broader awareness of the advent of the Anthropocene age and what this implies for the future of the planet. It then reviews some attempts to incorporate this awareness in the concept of "sustainability" within established disciplines such as economics and discusses the limitations of this approach. The article then turns to "globalization" and argues that this concept must be significantly enlarged to include various concurrent transformations and their relationship to sustainability. Humanity's collective failure to act decisively on the crucial issue of global warming is then diagnosed as not just a failure of institutions but as stemming from the inadequacy of the concepts that underlie their functioning. After critiquing some of these concepts, the article proposes an alternative approach that would be more appropriate to deal with the question of sustainability and uses the example of the COVID-19 pandemic to illustrate this point. An alternative model of governance is also outlined. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of International Journal of Interdisciplinary Global Studies is the property of Common Ground Research Networks and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)