Disasters最新文献

This paper analyses findings of the ‘PROWELLMIGRANTS’² project, which qualitatively investigated COVID-19 impacts on migrants’ well-being and mental health in Kerala, India. It draws on a novel conceptual framework that combines assemblage-thinking with theories of social contracts in disasters. The paper first explores how past development processes and contemporary migration policies in Kerala, and India more widely, generated conditions of vulnerability for migrant workers in Kerala prior to the pandemic. Next it shows that Government of Kerala interventions, in some cases supported by the central Government of India, temporarily addressed these vulnerabilities during the pandemic. In acknowledging the helpful response of the Kerala government, we problematise its stance on migrant workers during ‘normal’ times and speculate that permanently addressing these conditions of vulnerability would be a more logical approach. We acknowledge this involves overcoming many wider barriers. Thus, the paper also contains national-level policy implications.

Humanitarian organisations are increasingly utilising biometric data. However, we know little about the extent and scope of this practice, as its benefits and risks have attracted all the attention so far. This paper explores the biometric practices of the United Nations Refugee Agency, the United Nations World Food Programme, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Médecins Sans Frontières, and World Vision International. The study analysed relevant documents published over the past two decades and 17 semi-structured interviews with humanitarian workers conducted between June 2021 and June 2022. The findings reveal that humanitarian organisations use diverse types and functions of biometric data for different services, collaborate with many actors, and employ various data protection measures. Ultimately, challenging the straightforward generalisations about the use of such data, the paper argues that variational applications of biometrics in the humanitarian context require case-by-case analysis, as each instance will likely produce a different outcome.

Based on research with key stakeholders, this paper draws on theories of organisational and political listening to analyse the critical emergence of ‘localisation’ during the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit. The central focus is the two-year pre-summit consultation process, engaging 23,000-plus people, mainly from the Global South, and organised specifically to bring different views and experiences to the task of reforming the global humanitarian agenda. This research explores ‘voice and listening’ during the consultations, investigating how these were framed by, and have framed, power differentials within the humanitarian system. The consultations were a unique event, evoking optimism among participants that change might be possible. However, the space to speak, and the listening that occurred, struggled to breach the political sphere. The ‘Grand Bargain’, some interviewees claim, amounted to a re-silencing. Notably, the localisation debate happened when a largely coherent message from the Global South and allies emerged, making unmet but heard claims on powerful actors.

Coping and recovery capabilities in disasters depend to a large part on the social resilience of the societies or regions that are hit by the respective disruptions. Prior disaster studies suggest a variety of indicators to assess social resilience in the natural hazard context. This paper discusses whether the most common disaster-related social resilience indicators, including social cohesion and support, can meaningfully capture social resilience in pandemic crises, since pandemics typically entail physical distancing and other social restrictions. Based on a review of frequently used social resilience measures, this study proposes pandemic-tailored indicators of social resilience to map a society's or region's coping and recovery capabilities in a meaningful way. Applying the suggested set of indicators to a sample of 1,500 residents surveyed in Switzerland during the summer 2020 phase of the COVID-19 crisis revealed low levels of social support and community engagement, but a high level of willingness to help others.

This paper introduces the notion of ‘humanitarian ignorance’ to address growing concern regarding non-knowledge, as datafication becomes a central instrument and ambition of the humanitarian sector. With the turn to digital humanitarianism, contemporary humanitarian action increasingly relies on technology-driven quantification to expand the ability to collect, analyse, and present information. Utilising datafication processes, humanitarian organisations seek to assess ‘risk’ and mitigate ‘uncertainty’ more efficiently. Although central to their knowledge management and decision-making in low information circumstances, the conceptual notions of ‘risk’ and ‘uncertainty’ are inadequate to capture the full spectrum of non-knowledge in a time of digital humanitarianism. We introduce ‘humanitarian ignorance’ here to challenge the assumption that datafication allows humanitarian organisations to make fully informed, delimited, and thus ‘better’ decisions. Ultimately, we accentuate the paradox that while datafication is thought to reduce risk and uncertainty in humanitarian affairs by suggesting higher levels of control, insight, and certainty, these efforts in fact open new expanses of ignorance and unknowns.

The number of deaths owing to tropical cyclones in Bangladesh has significantly reduced. Category 4 Cyclone Gorky in 1991 and Sidr in 2007 caused 147,000 and 4,500 deaths respectively, whereas Category 1 Cyclone Mora in 2017 resulted in six. Face-to-face interviews with 362 residents, participant observation, and focus-group discussions answer a research question about how change in coastal areas has contributed to this outcome. The study considered institutional approaches of disaster risk management through legal frameworks, administrative arrangements, cyclone preparedness activities, cyclone detection and early warning dissemination, construction of shelter centres, strengthening of various types of coastal embankments, paved roads, and pre-cyclone evacuation. The findings indicate significant improvement in house structures and design, income levels and diversification, education, awareness, individual capacity, poverty reduction, and lowering dependency on agriculture-based earning. Furthermore, the availability of mobile telephones, radio, television, and social media platforms enhanced social connectivity and greater gender equality and empowerment helped to facilitate disaster preparedness, evacuation, and response.

Aid workers offer important perspectives for understanding better the most pervasive challenges that arise when implementing emergency response programming in humanitarian settings. This large sample study provides a global review of these perspectives, derived from 4,679 applications to the National NGO Program on Humanitarian Leadership, in which aid workers were asked to respond to the following question: ‘What do you consider to be the biggest challenges in the implementation of emergency response programming in today's humanitarian settings?’. Through a qualitative coding process, the research team identified 14 major challenges that were prevalent across the applicants’ responses and cross-tabulated these with their demographics. Coordination (30 per cent) and operating environment (29.5 per cent) were the most frequently reported. The study found a significant association between challenges identified and certain demographic variables. The results supplement a body of literature that is largely composed of small-scale, context-specific studies in which disaggre-gation of data by demographics is not possible.

This paper investigates changes in political participation following a disaster. Drawing on the electoral results and flood declarations after the 2010 flood in Slovakia, a dataset was constructed that illustrates when and how often each municipality was affected by disastrous conditions before the elections. The analysis revealed that experiencing a flood significantly increased the level of political participation in a municipality. However, the effect of flooding on elections is conditional. First, significantly higher turnout occurs only when a flood affects the municipality on election day. Second, repeated flooding before the elections does not change the overall participation rate. In contrast, it is the one-time, continuous extreme weather event that most mobilises voters. Third, only severely affected municipalities demonstrated a significant turnout effect. Lastly, the timing variable is crucial in determining the impact of repetition and severity. This paper distinguishes between different kinds of flood events that can influence disaster behaviour.

An abundance of unstructured and loosely structured data on disasters exists and can be analysed using network methods. This paper overviews the use of qualitative data in quantitative social network analysis in disaster research. It discusses two types of networks, each with a relevant major topic in disaster research—that is, (i) whole network approaches to emergency management networks and (ii) personal network approaches to the social support of survivors—and four usable forms of qualitative data. This paper explains five opportunities afforded by these approaches, revolving around their flexibility and ability to account for complex network structures. Next, it presents an empirical illustration that extends the authors' previous work examining the sources and the types of support and barrier experienced by households during long-term recovery from Hurricane (Superstorm) Sandy (2012), wherein quantitative social network analysis was applied to two qualitative datasets. The paper discusses three challenges associated with these approaches, related to the samples, coding, and bias.

This paper explores and analyses the activities of Swedish organised crisis volunteers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on a questionnaire and interviews, it sets out to answer two research questions on what characterised organised volunteerism during the pandemic, how organised volunteers experienced cooperation with local public actors, and how they viewed political steering. The paper contributes to a growing literature on the role of volunteers and links that role to views on political steering, something that is rarely done in disaster research. Sweden is a useful case study because of how COVID-19 was managed, as well as because there are organised crisis volunteers and a debate is occurring on how the national system is steered. The paper shows how organised volunteers adapted to changing needs and adopted new roles, that experiences of cooperation with local authorities varied, and that calls were made for a stronger national leadership and for more explicit central political steering.