Disasters最新文献

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.

Humanitarian and development agencies intervening in Latin American cities increasingly face the challenge posed by criminal armed groups (CAGs). Yet, there is a need for evidence-based comparative studies on how international agencies deal with them. Drawing on data collected in Colombia, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, and Mexico, this paper presents a novel typology of humanitarian organisations' access strategies that distinguishes between different levels of interaction with CAGs. The paper shows how humanitarian agencies assess a variety of risks and balance the potential consequences of their engagement with CAGs with the need to maintain constructive and trustful relationships with the state and the community with which they work. It finds that indirect dialogue or negotiation with CAGs via community leaders who act as intermediaries might provide a low-risk alternative to direct negotiation with CAG leaders, provided that ‘do no harm’ and humanitarian protection considerations vis-à-vis communities and intermediaries play a central role.

Vulnerability is not only a shared basic condition, but also a condition of potential. In the context of disasters and crises, the concept of vulnerability is frequently used to portray individuals and groups as ‘weak’, ‘threatened’, and ‘in need of help’. Occasionally, though, a shift occurs and the ‘threatened’—and therefore usually the pitied—become those who are feared and hated, that is, they become a ‘threat’. This paper explores how apparently incompatible discursive regimes of ‘threatened’ and ‘threat’ intertwine, merge, and feed upon each other, and how vulnerability can be and is consequently securitised. It demonstrates that too often the freedoms and opportunities prescribed by the neoliberal state are impossible to actualise when ‘normality’ and hence ‘otherness’ are also defined by the state, where people are first and foremost subjects of a global market. These considerations are critical if we are truly to reduce vulnerabilisation by focusing on justice.

While some communities appear to blossom in the wake of a disaster, others are left to struggle in the ashes. This paper introduces the concept of ‘conspicuous resilience’ to understand how emergent community-based recovery efforts privilege some needs while marginalising others, contributing to uneven forms of recovery. Drawing on a qualitative case study of the deadly Montecito debris flow in Southern California, United States, in January 2018, an in-depth examination of emergent community-based resilience efforts is gauged next to the social construction of unmet needs. Conspicuous acts of resilience centred around gaps in social and financial support as well as desires for protection from future debris flows. In defining and addressing needs, community-based interventions mirrored existing social inequalities and uneven relationships of power, promoting a false sense of equality and security while reinforcing private interests. To address the limits of conspicuous resilience, a justice-oriented politics of disaster recovery is needed.

Displacement in the context of disasters and climate change has gained considerable attention in international policy processes pertaining to migration and displacement over the past few years. However, analysis of currently dominant understandings of disaster displacement and its solutions at the global level, and how these translate into practice in relation to operational realities at the national level, remains scarce. This paper seeks to promote greater reflections on the discourse of displacement solutions in the context of disasters and climate change. It examines both the advancements and remaining gaps in approaches to disasters, displacement, and solutions and how these collectively shape the conceptualisation of solutions to disaster displacement. The inquiry sheds light on the dominant framings and their underlying assumptions and highlights the implications that they entail for understanding and responding to disaster displacement. It also underscores the importance of critical engagement with discursive practices at the international and national level.