Mapping Vulnerability: Disasters, Development and PeopleGreg Bankoff, Georg Frerks, Dorothea Hilhorst Routledge, 2013 M06 17 - 256 pages Raging floods, massive storms and cataclysmic earthquakes: every year up to 340 million people are affected by these and other disasters, which cause loss of life and damage to personal property, agriculture, and infrastructure. So what can be done? The key to understanding the causes of disasters and mitigating their impacts is the concept of 'vulnerability'. Mapping Vulnerability analyses 'vulnerability' as a concept central to the way we understand disasters and their magnitude and impact. Written and edited by a distinguished group of disaster scholars and practitioners, this book is a counterbalance to those technocratic approaches that limit themselves to simply looking at disasters as natural phenomena. Through the notion of vulnerability, the authors stress the importance of social processes and human-environmental interactions as causal agents in the making of disasters. They critically examine what renders communities unsafe - a condition, they argue, that depends primarily on the relative position of advantage or disadvantage that a particular group occupies within a society's social order. The book also looks at vulnerability in terms of its relationship to development and its impact on policy and people's lives, through consideration of selected case studies drawn from Africa, Asia and Latin America. Mapping Vulnerability is essential reading for academics, students, policymakers and practitioners in disaster studies, geography, development studies, economics, environmental studies and sociology. |
From inside the book
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... climate forecasts for the South American fishing sector, forest management in Indonesia, and agriculture in the southeast US. Past projects have included studying the role of women in Spanish fisheries politics, a legal analysis of ...
... climate forecast applications', Knowledge and Society Broad, K and Agrawala, S (2000) 'The Ethiopia food crisis: Uses and limits of climate forecasts', Science, 289: 1693–4 Omar D Cardona is the research director of Centro de Estudios ...
... Climate Diagnostics Center in the faculty of the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder. From 1988–2002 he served as a programme manager at the US National Oceanic and ...
... Climate and Socio-economic Impacts, Springer-Verlag Publications, Heidelberg Linda Stephen has recently been a research assistant at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford. She now works independently as a consultant ...
... climate change – has become increasingly apparent. In some ways, too, the authors attempt to explore new territory by moving beyond the treatment of vulnerability simply in terms of power relations to take into account people's agency ...
Contents
1 | |
A Political Ecological Perspective | 10 |
Vulnerability and Local Knowledge in Western Discourse | 25 |
A Necessary Review and Criticism for Effective Risk Management | 37 |
Unlocking Social Domains of Disaster Response | 52 |
Risk Reduction and Development Project | 67 |
Chapter 6 El Niño Events Forecasts and Decisionmaking | 83 |
An Ethiopian Case Study | 99 |
A Task for the Vulnerable People Themselves | 145 |
Dynamics Complexity and Public Policy | 159 |
Towards a More Nuanced Approach | 174 |
Chapter 13 Assessment of Capability and Vulnerability | 183 |
Vulnerability Analysis as a Means of Strengthening Policy Formulation and Policy Practice | 194 |
Notes | 206 |
References | 212 |
Index | 233 |
Chapter 8 From Vulnerability to Empowerment | 115 |
Chapter 9 Progress in Analysis of Social Vulnerability and Capacity | 128 |