[Radix] Rethinking Disaster Definitions

[Patrick Meier]

Dear All,

Learning about the disaster management community and challenges in disaster
response  (vis-a-vis conflict prevention) is still a rather steep learning
curve for me. That being said, I do see some parallels. Perhaps one of my
main concerns is that humanitarian intervention (whether in conflict or
disaster zones) is not typically based on need but driven by the political
economy of the disaster industry (and at times geopolitical interests). At
least that's what I gathered from my reading of the literature, e.g.,
Barrett, C. and Maxwell, D. Food Aid After Fifty Years: Recasting Its
Role(Routledge 2005). I realize my comment is descriptive and not
prescriptive,
and being at a policy school, I'm certainly interested in prescription, but
how effective will the prescription being sought be if one don't address
some of the structural impediments that exist? In other words, even if we
were to design the ultimate conceptual and operational framework for
humanitarian intervention, would it be effective (or as effective as
assumed) given these structural constraints? Is there a way to bypass
institutional/hierarchical barriers? How do we deal with the pervasive lack
of accountability that exists in disaster management and conflict
prevention?

Wishing you a good week,
Patrick




On 2/5/07, George Kent <kent at hawaii.edu> wrote:
>
> Friends --
>
> We could think of humanitarian assistance as being mainly about  life-
> saving assistance. After all, it is that.  Yes, to some extent it
> gets involved in dealing with injuries, property damage,  economic
> and social development, and several other concerns, but can we agree
> that, at its core, humanitarian assistance is mainly about saving
> human lives?
>
> Correlated with that, we can think of a humanitarian disaster/crisis/
> emergency as any situation in which there is the fact or the risk of
> elevated mortality. "Elevated" could be defined in terms of
> comparisons in time or comparisons in space. There could be some
> emergencies that are not of the humanitarian type, such as the Exxon
> Valdez oil spill, which could be labeled as an environmental disaster.
>
> A humanitarian disaster then would be any situation in which there is
> elevated mortality risk, and as a result there is a need for
> humanitarian assistance.
>
> The main challenge of disaster work then would be to figure out when,
> where, and how humanitarian assistance should be delivered.
>
> In this conceptual framework, the effectiveness of humanitarian
> assistance would be assessed in terms of estimates of the degree to
> which it reduced mortality in particular situations. Where the bottom
> line of corporations is profit, the corresponding bottom line in
> disaster work would be lives saved.
>
> In this framework, it would be possible to estimate cost-
> effectiveness, subjectively and through more analytic models. It
> would become clear, for example, that many more lives could be saved
> by promoting breastfeeding than by sending more arms to Iraq.
> Arguably, sending arms to Iraq might have other benefits, but on the
> dimension of life saving, it would not score high.
>
> I don't mean to take a reductionist approach to disaster work, but
> rather I want to suggest that there is a conceptually clear and solid
> core to it. Can we agree on this way of identifying that core?
>
> Aloha, George
>
>
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