to some measure related to human safety, such as floodwater depth and velocity; to economic criteria; or simply to levels of awareness among those at risk?
The use of risk management processes may encourage broader approaches; but such processes do not, by themselves, encourage multiple problem framings, although they can accommodate them. This is examined in more detail later in the chapter.
In summary, attributes predisposing institutions to disaster include:
• relying on stereotypes of what organizational structures and processes should be, rather than acting on the reality of deviations from design and warnings;
• the pressure of work (performance, productivity and time), resulting in safety procedures or failsafe processes being poorly addressed or ignored;
• unclear or confused objectives, such as production deadlines or public relations versus precaution or technical feasibility and safety;
• the inability to appreciate or monitor the full extent of the system so that critical parameters are overlooked;
• the issue of learning and blame: it is much easier to blame someone than to make the changes that might be needed for effective learning. Organizations have many opportunities to learn from disasters; however, two common impediments to learning from disasters are information flow, and blame and organizational priorities and politics (Turner, 1978). Organizations often learn the wrong things from an emergency management perspective, such as how to cut corners or reduce costs (e.g. the Herald of Free Enterprise Report from the Marine Accident Investigation Branch, undated).
To varying extents, these attributes reflect a failure to think in broad strategic terms beyond immediate pressures and priorities.
When we consider the environment external to specific organizations, our focus is on aspects of institutions that encourage or discourage disaster resilience by those at risk. The institutions of law, local economics and governance, as well as cultural aspects of power, are important in building resilience to disaster. Legal capacity, such as the ability to enforce safety regulations, is also important, as is an institutional environment that fashions patterns of exclusion from sources of power and enter- prise, such as the caste system in parts of India, gender divisions in many societies, or the invisibility of undocumented or illegal workers.
It is normal for major societal institutions to give signals that emergency manage- ment is a low priority, although this has not been the case with counter-terrorism.
This is generally couched in terms of privileging economic development over concerns about natural and technological hazards, and manifests itself as denial or optimism that the potential disaster will not happen for many years.
Social, economic and historical forces
Vulnerable communities exist everywhere – as discussed in Chapter 1 (see Handmer, 2003; Pelling, 2003; Wisner et al, 2004). There is limited agreement on how to measure vulnerability, and it is often asserted that poverty and vulnerability are not the same, largely because poverty is a state, while vulnerability has many components and can change rapidly. Nevertheless, being poor and poorly connected politically, resulting in exclusion from healthcare, sound housing, safety and security, employment opportunities, legal and administrative redress, and other services, is a reasonable first-level surrogate for vulnerability. However, very poor people have taken advantage of sound legal systems, where they are available, and have used the
media and political pressure to reduce their vulnerability (Handmer and Monson, 2004; Handmer et al, 2007).
Global trends widely seen as contributing to increased vulnerability by under- mining resilience and destroying livelihoods are war and civil strife, and aspects of economic globalization (see O’Keefe et al, 2004; see also the discussion in Chapter 1).
Globalized markets and production are creating vast complexes that produce goods and services for wealthier markets. These can be found in many areas of cheap labour, from the call centres of the UK and India, the export factories of Indonesia, Vietnam, and Shenzhen in China, the maquiladoras of the US–Mexican border, and the free- trade areas of island states such as Mauritius and Fiji. These complexes provide liveli- hoods for many people; but in many areas, wages are adequate for survival rather than sufficient to allow the accumulation of wealth, purchase of insurance or other ways of building resilience. In saying this we are aware that this refers to the formal economy. All over the world, and particularly in many African and Asian countries, informal or undocumented economies are expanding strongly, potentially enhancing the real livelihood status of the people involved (Bah and Goodwin, 2003; and see the website International Labour Organization; www.ilo.org).
In wealthier areas, vulnerable communities may emerge as industries close down or shift elsewhere and there is no replacement economic activity. Some areas may be affected by a combination of declining investment and deteriorating infrastructure, with an aging population with associated health and mobility issues, high unemploy- ment and perceptions (if not a reality) of social and political marginalization (e.g.
some former coal mining communities in south Wales, UK).
The issue of the extent to which disaster policy should address underlying vulner- abilities and seek to build community resilience, or focus on specific mitigation strat- egies, is discussed in Chapter 6. For many countries, a general approach dedicated to enhancing resilience through improving access to healthcare, employment security, improved housing and sanitation, etc. has a definite and immediate payoff with costs that can be shared, while the benefits from specific counter-disaster measures are contingent on an event, and on appropriate maintenance and procedures. Research by the Merseyside (UK) fire service showed that fires were closely related to socio- economic status: the more the service worked on the underlying causes of fires, the more it confronted issues of poverty and exclusion (McGurk, 2005).
The physical environment
It is a central theme of this book that so-called ‘natural’ disasters result from the interaction of human activities with the natural environment, with the resilience of the human activities the most significant component of this interaction and, importantly, the part we have direct influence over. There are at least three ways in which the natural environment can surprise us:
1 with very large natural events, such as the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami; at the national scale there are many examples (e.g. Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and the 1999 Sydney hailstorm);
2 through the movement of people or activities into more environmentally
challenging areas (e.g. as people move to the coast and warmer cyclone-prone areas, or vast squatter or informal settlements in many third world cities located in previously vacant areas prone to floods and landslides);
3 through environmental change, shifts or variation in climate or weather extremes, which alter the hazard, such as the long drought and strong warming trend in south-eastern Australia and substantial increase in the wildfire season’s length, severity and risk of mega-fires (large, uncontrollable and very destructive wild- fires), or destruction of natural resources on which people depend.
Since we cannot predict these surprises (or at least not precisely enough to plan ahead), policy makers need to be aware that the residual (unmanaged) risk may be very large, and disaster management will depend to a significant extent on the quality of emergency management, precautionary fail-safe measures and the resilience of those at risk.