Disasters open an extraordinarily revealing window on the workings of society. Through the disruption and the exigencies that they create, they expose, as it were, the "soft underbelly" of the social organism. With this in mind, I will now offer some reflections on the 'human condition' as seen through the lens of a student of disasters, crises and major incidents.
Each of us has a special skill to bring to
disaster risk reduction, but experience of crises and emergencies
suggests--proclaims, even--that our interventions should be made with careful
attention to the context of our work, as well as that of the events themselves
(Hewitt 2013). Disasters are multi-faceted phenomena and the threats and
impacts that they create require multi-disciplinary responses (Kruchten et al. 2008). Such is the
growing complexity of society that before long virtually all disasters and
major incidents of a certain size will be cascading events, which cannot be
understood in monodisciplinary terms (Pescaroli and Alexander 2015).
One effect of
disciplinary specialisation has been a tendency to shy away from the bigger
picture, which includes underlying risk drivers that represent the fundamental
causes of disaster. These lie in the domains of poverty, marginalisation, the
incidence and prevalence of disease (and in some countries malnutrition),
conflict, displacement, and, increasingly, climate change adaptation. So
powerful are the forces that create vulnerability, and so persistent is the
problem of disasters, that some analysts have begun to urge us to study
disaster risk creation, not disaster risk reduction (Oliver-Smith et al. 2016). And so
begins the search for reality in its stripped-down form.
As an initial question,
to what extent should policies and decisions be based on evidence? The current
fashion for "evidence-based practice" began in medicine (Sackett et
al. 2000). If a particular surgical operation was accomplished with a
consistently low level of success, there would presumably be evidence in the
operating theatre of what was going wrong, which would explain why practices
should be changed. Ostensibly, it is a good idea to base decisions on the
evidence of what actually happens when implementation takes place. Evidence can
be precise and decisive, and thus able to support good decision making. However,
it can also be equivocal, ambiguous, puzzling or uninterpretable--evidence of
what? Moreover, it can be ignored, distorted or used selectively so that the
picture of what is going on produces radically different interpretations
depending on which evidence is selected (Lau et al. 2006).
For some key issues, we
have very little evidence. For example, the role of perception and
self-protective behaviour in saving people's lives when buildings collapsed in
earthquake disasters is very poorly understood (Goltz and Bourque 2017). Although in
earthquake injury epidemiology we have more than 40 years of concerted studies,
the evidence is fragmentary and does not add up to useful empirical
generalisations on which with confidence and security we can base policy. In
migration studies, evidence is used in a highly selective manner. For example,
in the Western world migration policy tends to assume that immigrants are a
drain on the health and welfare services and national economies, and that they
take jobs from indigenous workers. The evidence tends to support the opposite
conclusion (Dustmann and Frattini
2014), but this does not affect policy when it is based on political
considerations rather than cold socio-economic logic. This consideration is
important to disaster specialists, as there is a substantial risk that a human
mobility crisis will overlay with another form of disaster and create a
compound event of extraordinary reach and intensity (Pigeon 2017).
In recent years there
has been an increasing divergence between policy and reality, if the latter can
be represented by something in the moral, ethical and legal domain. We live in
the age of mass cognitive dissonance (Metzger et al. 2016). On the one hand
there are xenophobia, the distrust of unfamiliar people, rejectionism,
the sense that it is not our problem, and distancing, or "not in my
back yard". On the other hand there is compassion, the desire to
help the needy, and charity, a willingness to donate. Seldom has the
human race been at such a crossroads!
This points to a major
lesson to be learned. None of us will be able fully to understand the problem
of disasters, let alone solve it, until we start to be realistic about the
world in which we live. As the work of Naomi Klein and Anthony Loewenstein has
shown us, in the field of 'disaster capitalism', disasters consolidate power
structures, augment profits, redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich,
allow the introduction of conveniently repressive measures and permit
gratuitous social engineering, including that which is achieved by forced
migration (Klein 2008, Loewenstein 2015). Put simply, disasters are a vehicle
for economic, social and political opportunism. Klein and Loewenstein argue
that this is because the dominant forces treat the economic and physiological
enfeeblement that disasters cause to affected populations as an opportunity for
exploitation. In a world in which half of all trade (and US$7.6 trillion), is
funnelled through 87 tax havens and eight men control as much wealth as 3.6 billion
other citizens, inequality and resource hoarding are a major influence on
disaster potential in all countries without exception (Oxam 2017).
Despite the
imperatives, sadly policy makers at all levels of government, commerce and
industry are generally uninterested in disaster risk reduction. Politically, it
has the 'negative kudos' of the "no votes in sewage" syndrome, i.e.
that a politician will not be elected for promising to build a new waste-water
treatment plant. As a consequence of this, and the predominance of other
political considerations, decisions are seldom made on the basis of evidence
and research.
One by-product is that
throughout the world corruption is one of the principal causes of disaster.
This can be seen in the erosion of planning laws (and the lack of adherence to
them) in floodable parts of London, England. It can be seen in the nuclear
release at Fukushima Dai'ichi, Japan, and it can be seen in the mass collapse of
relatively new buildings during earthquakes in countries such as Turkey and
Pakistan. Indeed, studies have shown that, at the national level in seismically
active countries, the gravity of earthquake disasters correlates most strongly
with weak governance and corruption in planning, construction and building code
enforcement (Escaleras et al. 2007, Ambraseys and Bilham 2011). The greatest
difficulty with this thesis is how to measure corruption, which is often
dangerous to study, is often pervasive, is always occult and does not
necessarily involved the transgression of laws. However, as vulnerability is
the root of disaster, corruption adds to it--immeasurably, in both senses of
the word.
Much of world policy on
disaster risk reduction is national and international in genesis and is
therefore "top down". Field studies suggest that it does not easily
reach the local level. The United Nations International Strategy for Disaster
Reduction has endeavoured to counteract this by organising the 'Safe Cities'
initiative, with principles and guidelines for reducing disaster risk at the
local level (UNISDR 2013). A thousand towns and cities have joined the
initiative, but as there are more than a million urban settlements above the
village level, only about 0.1% of the world's cities are involved.
Despite this,
theorists, and many practitioners, believe that local-level activism is
possible and the community is the best vehicle for measures to reduce disaster
risk and impact (Berkes and Ross 2013). That is fine, but it ushers in some
thorny problems. One is that there is no innate geographical scale at which to
define the concept of 'community'. Is a community a street, a neighbourhood, a
city, a world-wide group of like-minded individuals, or what? Secondly,
communities are often neither homogeneous nor harmonious. Rivalry and rancour
abound in them. Thirdly, identification with the community is a highly variable
phenomenon. As sociologists discovered nearly 40 years ago, disasters can
produce subcultures, represented by very heterogeneous groups of people who
have a common agenda, and subcultures can produce emergent groups, such as
survivors' networks and pressure groups (Wenger and Weller 1973). However,
these are not always therapeutic phenomena and not always graced with
longevity.
Fourthly, power
structures are evident in the make-up of communities, which tend to be
dominated by the interests of their most powerful members or overlords. One
consequence of this is 'elite capture', in which the popular agenda is captured
by the dominant interests (Kundu 2011). It is as likely to be encountered in
the Thames basin of outer London as it is in the villages of Bangladesh.
Another consequence is marginalisation, in which groups of people are deprived
of the economic, political and social power needed to achieve
self-determination. Marginalisation has been found to be strongly correlated
with vulnerability to disaster, as has the poverty that accompanies it (Wisner
and Luce 1993). Again, these are features of all societies, rich and poor.
In a just society,
imbalances of opportunity would be counteracted by welfare, a term that,
curiously, all and sundry seem to shy away from defining. It is clearly too
much of a political hot potato, but here is my own definition: "The
provision of care to a minimum acceptable standard to people who are unable
adequately to look after themselves." In disaster, welfare assumes
paramount importance, but it is easily subverted by politics and opportunism.
We therefore need to look carefully at what welfare is not, as much as at what
it is. What is legitimate care and support, and what is a debilitating source
of aid-dependency or a political sweetener in exchange for votes?
The dismal picture of
dark forces and negative changes that I have drawn is the result of a pervasive
tendency not to tackle the root causes of disaster. Perhaps we lack the means,
but there is also a reluctance to look reality in the face, and that leads to a
further tendency to underestimate the power of disaster and to misinterpret its
causes. In 1983 a book entitled Interpretations of Calamity appeared,
edited by the Canadian-British geographer Kenneth Hewitt (Hewitt 1983). The
authors of this volume promoted what has come to be known as the 'radical
critique', which argues that vulnerability is the key to disaster, while
hazard, or threat, is merely the trigger of events. Paradoxically, since the
mid-1980s, we have seen the massive growth of hazard studies and only a modest
increase in vulnerability studies. The money is in seismology, volcanology, and
the 'technofix' solution to everything from storms to terrorism. In the meantime,
vulnerability continues to grow, proliferate and send its insidious feelers
into many aspects of life.
Does the explanation
for such paradoxes lie in culture, perhaps? As scientists we are taught that
there is only one reality and science can somehow "nail it down".
Other interpretations are fallacious and to be despised. However, 37 years
spent studying disasters have convinced me that there are many realities, and
they stem from remarkably different interpretations of what constitutes rationality.
If, as happened in June 2015, a Malaysian cabinet minister states publicly that
an earthquake occurred because tourists took their clothes off on a sacred
mountain, we may chortle and dismiss the assertion, but it nevertheless
influences people's perceptions and thus has a concrete effect.
We have long known that
the enigma of people's attitudes to disaster, and actions in the face of
disaster risk, are a function of human cultures. Anthropologists have been
quick to claim the high ground here, and they have conducted some notable field
studies of disaster culture (Oliver-Smith 2004). However, in recent years there
has been a renewed interest in trying to understand how culture influences
other aspects of disaster and other fields by which disaster is interpreted.
Culture is remarkably
hard to measure. It is something we are born with and develop as we mature.
Many of the aspects of culture that are thus created are, to use the
terminology of the linguist Kenneth Pike, 'emic', or culturally specific (i.e.,
not common to all cultures, or to many of them--Franklin 1996). In the modern
age, cultural metamorphosis is driven largely by technological developments,
which are decidedly 'etic', or culturally universal. This promotes fusion and
the constant reinterpretation of cultural norms. By and large, emic elements of
culture mutate less rapidly than etic ones do (Alexander 2000). They are the
'ballast' of culture. Cultural change can be achieved, but only by persistent
application of effort and recognition that change will be slow and continuous,
for cultures do not change overnight. In the meantime, projects that are
culturally compatible are likely to succeed, while those that are not will
fail, no matter how rational and laudable they are. A more unstable factor is
represented by risk perception. Forces are constantly at work that both create
risk and abate it. Which of these wins, and how the balance is tipped, depends
on the 'wild card' of risk perception. Note, however, that the 'wild card' is
constrained by the cultural filter (or lens) by which we interpret the world at
all levels from the individual to the international.
It is vital that the
social sciences embrace cultural analysis. Cultural differences may explain,
for example, why the sociological definition of panic is so different from that
entertained by psychologists (Alexander 1995). In this sense, it is a matter of
both how these constituencies interpret the meaning of culture, and how the
cultures of sociology and psychology operate to constrain the interpretations.
The picture is complicated by the fact that at the individual level, culture is
like Chinese boxes or Russian dolls: it is a multiple phenomenon. No wonder it
is hard to pin down in any scientific manner.
In conclusion, we live
in a world of changing realities. Identity and sovereignty have remained relatively
immutable for four hundred years, but they are now entering a period of radical
change. Welfare, entitlement and human rights are essential elements of
disaster risk reduction, but they are under extreme duress in a world in which
equality is a receding goal.
Many of these
ruminations have no apparent practical outcome, but the reader will ask what we
can do as individuals and groups. The first thing is to search for the
underpinnings of reality, read between the lines, strive to interpret events in
more fundamental ways. Awareness is the lynch-pin of action. We must all
advocate and strive for policies, practices and procedures that take account of
the world as it really is. If we understand the fundamental drivers of disaster
we can concentrate on reducing them, rather than merely prodding away at the
symptoms.
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