Transforming Disaster Response: Federalism and Leadership by William Lester

Author:William Lester [Lester, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781420094640
Google: xQFlDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 14312675
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Vulnerability

The major disaster model utilizing the structural approach is the “vulnerability” paradigm (Tierney et al., 2001). The vulnerability paradigm uses several theoretical perspectives to explain disasters. For instance, Bankoff (2003) suggested vulnerability has an element of structural disorganization, while Enarson and colleagues (2003) and Bolin and Stanford (1998) suggested vulnerability has a political economy dimension, meaning power and its unequal distribution creates disproportionate levels of vulnerability. Finally, Oliver-Smith and Hoffman (1999) presented vulnerability within the symbolic interactionist approach. Oliver-Smith suggested vulnerability could be a socially constructed process viewed from the affected group’s perspectives. For example, richer individuals might see their right to build in a potential hurricane impacted zone differently from how they see poorer people living in the zone.

While one might suggest the paradigm of vulnerability is confused between the various theoretical perspectives, the prevailing thought is that each theoretical perspective has utility and is an important component of the concept. The concepts of vulnerability, adaptation, and coping capacity help define the potential for managing future hurricane risk (Hewitt, 1983; Green et al., 1994; Cutter, 1996; Wisner et al., 2004). Thus, the concept of disaster as vulnerability is an inclusive theoretical approach utilizing aspects of all of the discussed concepts to explain how disasters influence systems and this must be understood if we are trying to make lasting and beneficial systemic changes.

While disaster as a concept continues to evolve, researchers can use various elements from each theoretical perspective as a foundation for research. Blaikie and colleagues (1994) characterized disasters as developing when physical events acting as trigger mechanisms interact with a society’s underlying social issues. They further suggested a system’s strength is created by a community’s actions. Stallings (1994) classified disasters in the sense of system failures and suggested these failures are determined by how one defines a social problem and what one does to eliminate the risk stemming from it. Bolin and Stanford (1998) added that disasters are contingent on members of the community sharing common perspectives of what constitutes disruptions, problems, and defines the threshold for meeting them. They also pointed out that a community and/or its inhabitants may or may not have the capacity to influence social issues; they term this inability as vulnerability.

Social, political, and economic systems are the key drivers that create vulnerability. Blaikie and colleagues (2005) offered that the general approach in understanding a society’s vulnerability resides in the identification of their root causes, dynamic pressures, and unsafe conditions. Root cause refers to general social, political, and economic factors that create unequal distributions of resources. Root causes translate into dynamic pressures or social processes such as rapid urbanization, environmental degradation, economic crisis, political conflict, and access that negatively act upon a community’s inhabitants. The process of dynamic pressures creates unsafe conditions that in turn set the stage for potential disasters. A disaster occurs when vulnerable groups are exposed to events and do not have the capacity to anticipate, cope with, resist, and recover from a natural event’s impact (which is determined by the group’s access to resources).

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