The news is full of disasters: droughts, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, chemical spills and more. They are more frequent, and their scale of impact is growing according to UN reports. A whole industry focused on disaster risk reduction and response has grown up. But does this address uncertainties or just focus on risk, trying to improve prediction?
Moving from global UN discussions around the ‘Sendai framework’ to the rangelands of southern Ethiopia, the sixth chapter in the book, Navigating Uncertainty: Radical Rethinking for a Turbulent World, looks at how disasters are constructed and responded to by different actors. It finds that externally-imposed technological and financial solutions focused on early warning, anticipatory action, risk management or ‘de-risking’ (such as through insurance) are not trusted and do not integrate well with local experiences of multiple, intersecting uncertainties.
Problematic assumptions of conventional approaches
In most conventional disaster risk management approaches, “the assumption is that, with better knowledge and improved early warning, preparedness and response systems, then disasters can be managed and risks reduced. A whole panoply of technical interventions is in turn proposed, with the big tech and insurance companies offering their skills in data management and prediction. For example, the major reinsurer, SwissRe, offers CatNet®, a proprietary software for location-based identification of hazards and as a tool “for efficient, accurate underwriting and risk management.” In the same vein, Google FloodHub – a free-to-use interface – forecasts riverine floods based on artificial intelligence models of river flow and flooding to allow for early anticipatory action, offering flood maps for early warning efforts globally.
In this standard disaster risk reduction framing, disasters are usually seen as singular, catastrophic events – a drought, an earthquake and so on – although what are termed ‘slow onset’ disasters are also increasingly recognised. Emergencies that arise are the focus of mobilisation of resources, deployment of equipment and people and the provision of humanitarian relief for those in need. The military-style response, involving complex logistics and rapid response, allows external actors, including states and humanitarian agencies, to respond quickly, or so the argument goes.”
As the chapter observes, “there are many questions raised as to whether this risk-focused, techno-managerial approach is appropriate for addressing uncertain conditions, where we don’t know what will happen when, and probably can’t. An acknowledgement of uncertainty – rather than accepting everything can be managed as risk – raises some difficult questions for the type of interventions usually proposed.”
The politics of disasters
The chapter looks at both examples of commercial insurance and standard approaches to early warning and disaster preparedness in pastoral areas, focusing on southern Ethiopia, and finds many problems with both assumptions and applications. But the same applies to other settings, whether flooding in New York State or New Orleans in the US or heatwaves in France, as other cases show. The chapter finds multiple tensions and contradictions, and with this, a particular politics of disasters.
The chapter goes on to explain that “the vision of disaster risk reduction and management, with its models, risk management plans and insurance protocols creates a moral and political order – often driven by profit-seeking and cost-cutting – and a set of expectations often at odds with those facing disasters themselves or a wider culture of safety. As we have seen, disaster management acts to control the future in the present through a range of techniques and practices aimed at offsetting the impacts of disasters when they strike. Through this process of ‘governing through emergencies’, disasters are separated from the everyday and ordinary through technical and political interventions, at least for the privileged.
An open-ended, liberal view of the future underlies this, where offsetting ‘exceptional’ disaster events can offer progressive opportunities both for business and for living a ‘modern life’. The ‘emergency’ or ‘crisis’ thus becomes the modus operandi of the liberal state, protecting citizens through humanitarian efforts while imposing regulations, plans and limits. ‘De-risking’ society through the financialisation of disasters – involving the public funding of private investment – in turn provides opportunities for some to exploit disasters for profit, sometimes creating predatory forms of ‘disaster capitalism’ in the wake of disasters.”
Imagining alternatives
What then are possible alternatives to the standard approach to disaster risk management? The chapter explains how “instead of relying only on assumptions of calculable, single and separate risks as the basis for early warning, insurance schemes, anticipatory action, contingency plans and social assistance programmes, responding to uncertainty requires a more agile, flexible system, which is rooted in local, shared responses and adapted to diverse contexts, centred on collective action and garnering trust through inclusivity. Such an approach would draw on ways people… actually respond to disasters, located in their own contexts and temporalities. For disasters are always uncertain, part of a complex web of interacting factors that combine and compound….. For many, such as the pastoralists of southern Ethiopia, disasters are part of everyday experience; in some ways they are also expected and ‘normal’, even if they are not predictable.”
For example, “Instead of an external early warning system defining what people should do as part of an intermittent, top-down, event-based emergency response, a permanent, locally-networked system of early warning, based on deliberation around uncertainties, can be envisaged. Such systems would be informed by scientific assessments but not be dominated by them, as translating warnings into early action is always social, requiring effective timing, flexibility and transparency in responses.”
The chapter highlights a reimagined approach to disasters and emergencies, which involves “mobilising networks of practice, knowledge, support and redistribution from within communities is essential. This puts a collective ‘moral economy’ based on local knowledges and solidarities at the heart of disaster preparedness and response. Of course, this is not an appeal to focus only on the local and vernacular, as such responses must negotiate relationships with scientists, state bureaucracies, NGOs, religious organisations and others, but disaster management and response must always start from people’s own experiences and needs.”
The chapter concludes that “reconnecting with local approaches to managing uncertainty would in many ways mean recapturing the origins of insurance approaches and humanitarian and social protection systems: not as technical-managerial instruments imposed from above, located in an individualised politics of the market or state control but.. in really-existing processes and practices more rooted in vernacular knowledges and collective commitments to solidarity, mutual support and care.”
This series of blogs gives a taste of the different chapters, but you will have to read the book to get the full picture, as well as all the case study details, the references and footnotes! You can buy the book (or download it for free) through this link: Navigating Uncertainty: Radical Rethinking for a Turbulent World (politybooks.com). And if you are in the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland or France, do come along to the first launches in October. It’s Amsterdam today! BOOK: Navigating Uncertainty – Pastoralism, Uncertainty and Resilience – PASTRES. If you missed the first event at IDS on October 3, you can check out the recording: Navigating uncertainty: Radical rethinking for a turbulent World – Institute of Development Studies (ids.ac.uk)).
