Disasters最新文献

This paper examines, both theoretically and empirically, the relationship between rapid-onset disasters and women's economic freedom. Rapid-onset disasters create difficulties for all involved, but without proper discussion of and changes to women's economic status in society, they will continue to suffer disproportionately. The study answers the following question: ‘how do disasters impact women's economic empowerment?‘. It argues that there are underlying factors contributing to unequal economic opportunities that are exacerbated by disasters. Current literature discusses how disasters affect women's economic and political rights, but often it does not account for variables that may not have been captured in contemporary indices. The paper assesses women's burden of care, restrictions on mobility, formal economic employment, and access to recovery resources with respect to their economic empowerment. And it analyses 180 countries and territories that experienced disasters between 1981 and 2019 to uncover their effects on women's economic freedom. This research could facilitate and help to alter the overall narrative on women's empowerment.

Amartya Sen, the economist and philosopher, defines entitlement as command over resources that permits a household to have access to essential goods and services to sustain life within legal and established social norms and practices. Entitlement failure occurs when a household's command over all available combinations of resources does not ensure sufficient provisions of food to avoid starvation. This paper provides an overview of the literature on causal relations between civil war and household entitlements. It suggests a conceptual framework for empirically analysing the ramifications of armed political conflict on household entitlements. In addition, it develops a composite index as a tool to investigate the effect of civil war on household entitlements and to guide policy in the context of conflict-related international humanitarian interventions. The paper's key contribution is to suggest an empirical framework for quantitative measurement of the impact of civil war on household entitlements and to improve targeting criteria in post-conflict rehabilitation efforts.

Large-scale disasters are frequently portrayed as temporally bounded, linear events after which survivors are encouraged to ‘move on’ as quickly as possible. In this paper, we explore how understandings of disaster mobilities and temporalities challenge such perspectives. Drawing on empirical research undertaken on Dhuvaafaru in the Maldives, a small island uninhabited until 2009 when it was populated by people displaced by the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, we examine what such understandings mean in the context of sudden population displacement followed by prolonged resettlement. The study reveals the diversity of disaster mobilities, how these reflect varied and complex temporalities of past, present, and future, and how processes of disaster recovery are temporally extended, uncertain, and often linger. In addition, the paper shows how attending to these dynamics contributes to understandings of how post-disaster settlement brings stability for some people while producing ongoing feelings of loss, longing, and unsettlement in others.

Narratives are a means of making sense of disasters and crises. The humanitarian sector communicates stories widely, encompassing representations of peoples and events. Such communications have been critiqued for misrepresenting and/or silencing the root causes of disasters and crises, depoliticising them. What has not been researched is how such communications represent disasters and crises in Indigenous settings. This is important because processes such as colonisation are often at the origin but are typically masked in communications. A narrative analysis of humanitarian communications is employed here to identify and characterise narratives in humanitarian communications involving Indigenous Peoples. Narratives differ based upon how the humanitarians who produce them think that disasters and crises should be governed. The paper concludes that humanitarian communications reflect more about the relationship between the international humanitarian community and its audience than reality, and underlines that narratives mask global processes that link audiences of humanitarian communications with Indigenous Peoples.

This paper investigates the impact of a community disaster awareness training on subjective disaster preparedness, focusing on the case of a Republic of Korean aid-supported disaster risk reduction project in the Ayeyarwaddy region of Myanmar. A subsequent survey by the authors of a total of 182 households, an equal number of project participating and control households, produced encouraging results regarding the endeavour. Although both ordinal logistic regression and ordinary least squares models support overall robust effectiveness of participating in the project, the results also reveal different effects of specific activities. Disaster risk reduction (DRR) awareness meetings and trainings, and personal visits to share knowledge and/or to distribute informative flyers, are important. In contrast, the significance of drills or community activities, in mass, is lost in a combined model. Consequently, ‘personalising risk’ should be prioritised in any DRR undertaking, as well as, and in particular, development cooperation aimed at increasing confidence in disaster preparedness.

Newspaper sentiment and framing have the power to represent and inform public opinion on a variety of important issues. This study examines local news articles after Hurricane Florence struck North Carolina in the United States in September 2018 to understand the framing efforts undertaken by the outlets that produced these reports, as well as their impact on news sentiment towards the flood recovery efforts of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The results indicate that while most articles published in the wake of Florence have a neutral sentiment, there are a significant number of both positively and negatively coded articles that illuminate important information about how the public engaged with and comprehended the role of FEMA during recovery from the disaster, and how the media chose to cover its involvement. Such scrutiny will continue to inform how public, private, and government actors understand FEMA's role and whether it achieves its goals in the future.

Disaster survivors are often criticised for being dependent on humanitarian (and development) assistance. This dependency is perceived pejoratively by civil servants and other elites, including non-governmental organisation staff. Officials offered up such narratives in relation to the disaster response and recovery programmes following the Nepal earthquake of 2015. Using a Bourdieusian framework, and undertaking qualitative inquiry in four earthquake-affected districts of Nepal, this paper contrasts the official narratives of dependency syndrome with people's perspectives and lived experiences. The findings problematise official discourse. Aid was frequently insufficient, poorly targeted, or non-existent. Moreover, the Bourdieusian framing highlights the agency of survivors, as their habitus predisposed them to help others. It broadens the notion of assistance and dependence, suggesting that social and cultural (as well as economic) capital are vital resources for recovery. Lastly, it shows that dependencies are not necessarily bad. Greater attention to these non-economic capitals and ‘good dependencies’ could expedite recovery from future disasters.

Water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) interventions prevent and control disease in humanitarian response. To inform future funding and policy priorities, WASH ‘gaps’ were identified via 220 focus-group discussions with people affected by crises and WASH practitioners, 246 global survey respondents, and 614 documents. After extraction, 2,888 (48 per cent) gaps from direct feedback and 3,151 (52 per cent) from literature were categorised. People affected by crises primarily listed ‘services gaps’, including a need for water, sanitation, solid waste disposal, and hygiene items. Global survey respondents principally cited ‘mechanism gaps’ in providing services, including collaboration, WASH staffing expertise, and community engagement. Literature highlighted gaps in health (but not other) WASH intervention impacts. Overall, people affected by crises wanted the ‘what’ (services), responders wanted the ‘how’ (to supply), and researchers wanted the ‘why’ (health consequences). This study suggests a need for a renewed focus on basic WASH services, collaboration across stakeholders, and research on WASH outcomes beyond health.