Recently I sat down with Emmanuel , who heads the Master of Disaster Management at University of Copenhagen, to talk about disaster risk management. What are disasters? What is their relationship with society and inequality in society? And why do we need to use a decolonial lens when discussing disasters?
Glossary:
- Disaster: occurs when a significant number of vulnerable people experience a hazard and suffer severe damage and/or disruption of their livelihood system in such a way that recovery is unlikely without external aid. (Wisner et al., 2003)
- Hazard: “A dangerous phenomenon, substance, human activity or condition that may cause loss of life, injury or other health impacts, property damage, loss of livelihoods and services, social and economic disruption, or environmental damage.” (Oliver-Smith, 1999)
- Vulnerability: This refers to the susceptibility of exposed elements (such as people, infrastructure, and ecosystems) to suffer harm when a hazard occurs. Vulnerability is influenced by factors like socio-economic status, access to resources, governance, health, and the ability to adapt. (Oliver-Smith, 1999; Wisnet et al., 2003)
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R: Can you explain how disasters are not a singular thing, but part of a wider system?
E: Historically, people speak of disasters as ‘natural disasters’, but we are slowly moving away from that language. Hazards, such as earthquakes or cyclones, are natural, disasters are not. That is to say: earthquakes and floods only become disasters because they impact our society. You can read more about this here.
Globally, research focuses on unravelling why and how people are impacted by disasters. Essentially, it all comes back to how societies are organized. Disasters are products of inequity, and inequities in society manifest during disasters.
This comes back to questions of power structures such as caste, gender and race, which marginalize certain populations. Marginalisation results in inequity, which leads to higher vulnerability to disasters. Even if everyone in a population is impacted during a disaster, there are always disproportionate consequences on how much people are concretely affected by these disasters. Thus, through these differences in impacts, disasters expose social inequities.
R: What kind of differences in impact could that be?
E: People without any access to social welfare, or who experience less stability in their access to day-to-day basic needs, are more impacted during disasters.
For instance, during the mega heat waves in South Asia in 2022 , which was attributed to climate change, impacted different people differently. If you’re working from home or in an office, you might have access to air conditioning, which reduces (health) impacts of the heatwaves. This is very different to a street vendor, who is selling vegetables or other products on the street. As a street vendor, you have no access to a cooling system. At the same time, if you don’t go out and work, you will have no wages to take home. That is again about access to resources to be able to cope with the disaster! This is critical in understanding inequality in impacts of disasters.
I started conducting research about disasters around 15 years ago, when I was looking at the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami. This year marks twenty years since the tsunami. I’m going back to the places whereI worked 15 years ago, to talk about long-term recovery, and it’s sad to see how people in these communities are still impacted to this day. The communities I work with are constantly caught in cycles of disasters [i. e. they experience recurrent, often seasonal disasters, on a regular basis], and people take up one loan after another to recover from these disasters, because there are no social protection mechanisms. This adds additional vulnerability through financial pressure to already vulnerable communities.
Social factors influence the disproportional impacts of disasters. Even within one community, there are some groups that might be worse off: for instance children and women, people with disabilities or people from a certain caste group. For example, during disasters, there may be groups who have more or less access to disaster relief, and this depends on the agency that people have to negotiate during the recovery process. We saw this clearly during the housing reconstruction process after the Indian Ocean Tsunami- when people were resisting relocation to far away places from where they lived when the disaster occurred.
R: So how about the ‘impact’ timeline of a disaster? You’re speaking of cycles of disasters, referring to repeated, frequent disasters. Would you also say that certain people are impacted for a longer time?
E: Absolutely. People have different ways of recovering and people have different ways of coping. The recipe for a disaster (pre-existing inequality in society) starts far before the event that we call a ‘disaster’ has occurred. As I said earlier, the impacts are often a manifestation of the existing vulnerability in society of who is impacted and how and why. That is to say: disasters are manifestations of societal inequity.
Even basic recovery, meaning creating a basic livelihood and re-establishing a home, might take much longer for some people, because you are caught up in these cycles of disasters. People struggle to ‘finish recovering’ from one disaster as the next one already hits. People with better access to resources might cope better. Besides that, the recovery of intangible losses related to wellbeing and mental health might take a longer time.
In my own work, I am looking at housing resettlement in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. Twenty years later, we are talking to people who have been relocated after the disaster to new settlement sites on a flood path. That means that these communities are exposed to new disasters, as a result of a recovery process from a previous disaster. In this way, the recovery process has created new forms of disaster risk. On the surface, this might look like separate disasters, however, it’s actually part of one interconnected timeline disproportionately affecting these communities.
The resettlement site that I’m talking about is also on the periphery of a larger city, Chennai, in South India. Relocation sites were placed far from the city centre, which results in limited access for the people to the city. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of people were cut off from the city and its social services. As a result, people had limited access to work opportunities due to lockdowns and other regulations. In this case, harmful impacts were not caused by the hazard itself, but by other factors surrounding the vulnerable population.
“What is unimaginable to us, but what you see there, is that people in these communities have sort of normalised disasters as ‘just part of their lives.”
Essentially, it all comes down to access. This is true for both the amount of time for which people are impacted by disasters, and regarding to what extent they are disproportionately impacted by a disaster.
The way society is structured, and provides access to different communities in the population is key to managing the impacts of disasters. I am talking about access to work, access to education, access to livelihoods, access to coping mechanisms, all of these things. Access is a keyword, however, there are many other things such as power dynamics, which also affect the way you’re impacted by a disaster.
R: Speaking of power dynamics… They are often influenced by colonial power structures. How do you see the historical context of colonialism influencing current disaster risk management practices?
E: Briefly summarised, I believe that many practices around disaster risk management, which were established in the past, strongly influence the way we speak, discuss and act on disasters.
“For example, definitions around disasters are so generalised within Western-led academic frameworks, while disasters and their impacts are so context-specific.“
During the Pakistani floods of 2022, the link to climate change was heavily discussed in the media. However, this disaster also showed a clear, but ‘less-discussed’ link to colonialism. Colonial structures from the past continue to impact the outcomes we see of climate change today. Climate change directly impacts the severity and frequency of disasters, but at the same time, the dynamics around dam constructions, land use policy, land tenure and urban planning are all based on and influenced by (neo)colonial legacies. Therefore, colonial legacies both amplify the impacts of climate change, and contribute to disproportionate impacts of disasters on their own.
Essentially, the past and present of colonialism come together and define which impacts we see on which populations.
R: So can you discuss how power dynamics within disaster management frameworks may perpetuate colonial legacies? What steps can be taken to address these issues?
E: It is a huge problem. There are many ways and forms in which power is exercised by a researcher or donor from an institution that holds any form of power. There are massive power hierarchies in partnerships between the Global Majority and global minority world. The centre of knowledge production continues to be situated in an extremely western science-dominated paradigm, which is broadly based on a Western-dominated publication model as well. Even if we take the question of publishing open access; it costs a lot of money to publish open access. Many of our friends and partners across the world do not have that kind of research funding.
“Similarly, there are impacted communities who are repeatedly getting interviewed by researchers from the global minority world. This leads to fatigue if no real change is witnessed.“
There’s an interesting article that Professor JC Gaillard wrote a few years ago on the ‘Gold Rush’ for data to be collected and published during disaster situations.
We need to ask ourselves: ‘What is the code of conduct in conducting research in disaster situations? Oftentimes people with lived experiences, people from disaster-affected regions, do not get consulted when research projects are being designed or discussed.
There are some important questions that we need to ask:
- How are students trained to critically reflect on these questions, not just in a classroom session, but throughout the entire learning process?
- How do we reflect on these questions in our own workplaces and in our own corridors?
- How do we create more equitable workplaces that allow the space to discuss all of these power structures and dynamics, and not just to engage with these questions in a very superfluous way?
I think we’re very far away from institutional practices being challenged enough, but it’s happening more and more.
In light of this, many disaster researchers and scholars came together a few years ago to open up the conversation about these frustrations within larger disaster risk management questions across the world.
It culminated in what we refer to as the Disaster Studies Manifesto. The process of the Manifesto essentially started as a space for people to come together to explore ideas on genuine partnerships and improve equity in relationships between local and external researchers. We asked ourselves: ‘How do we create a space where we recognize the complexity of this work, while at the same time establishing some core principles for ourselves that are central to the work that we want to do and the future that we want altogether?’’How do we talk about diverse epistemologies?’ ‘How do we talk about indigenous constructs’ ‘How do we talk about local ontologies?’
All of these questions were brought together in the Disaster Studies Manifesto, which led us to draft what we call the Disaster Studies Accord. In this Accord, we put together a diverse set of questions coming from researchers across the world. It was a call for transformation, a call for all of us to reflect on these questions when we conduct our research. We should ask uncomfortable questions, and this has not happened enough. I think this is part of the problem.
R: I think a lot of institutions, whether it’s academic institutions or organisations, are trying to adopt a decolonial lens, whether it’s within disaster risk studies or global health, but a lot of times it falls prey to ‘buzzwordification’. So, what do you think is the promise of this Manifesto? How does it prevent this ‘buzzwordification’?
E: My worry is, of course, as you said, that decolonization can turn into a buzzword. I think what the Manifesto does is that it brings together multiple voices. It’s not driven by one institution or one individual. It attempted to bring people together on an equal footing, and there were multiple rounds of iterations. Throughout the drafting process, we had many discussions on, for example, what we mean by ‘local’ or ‘external’. This is also why, in the end, we don’t have the classic model of authorship with the Manifesto. We all are signatories. There was a drafting committee which agreed on this. For similar reasons, we published the Manifesto on a website and not in a journal.
The Accord has opened up a space for reflection for people to be able to ask critical questions about their own research, even though we are realising that we are caught in institutional barriers. With this as a beginning point, we can start to challenge these institutional barriers and start addressing them. Things are moving in baby steps, at a slow pace, however, I hope it does create some difference in the long run.
Our team will hopefully meet again next year to discuss some of the challenges that we’ve encountered in this process so far. We will discuss what we can do to create a space for more allyship and leadership across the world. Hopefully, we will draft some next steps on where to take the Manifesto and the Accord next.
R: Having been part of this project yourself, what are the biggest lessons you’ve learned from these conversations?
One of my personal biggest learnings and something that challenged me was identifying what it means to me to be both a researcher based in a Western institution, but also someone who has lived experience from the majority world. And how do these two come together? I am slowly starting to unpack this, even though I’ve been here for 15 years.
And I have learned that we continue to live in a system that gets away with using real concepts as buzzwords, but that does not actually take concrete steps. We have to change that.
Editor’s note: Emmanuel’s answers have been edited for clarity, not content.
References
- Oliver-smith (1999). “What is a disaster?” Anthropological perspectives on a persistent question. Routledge.
- Wisner, B., Blaikie, P., Cannon, T., & Davis, I. (2003). At Risk: Natural Hazards, People Vulnerability and Disasters. Routledge.
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