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
Results 1-5 of 57
... often hampered by the lack of an adequate historical perspective from which to understand the contexts and roots of disaster causality (OliverSmith, 1986, p18; Lees and Bates, 1984, p146).3 It is not Introduction: Mapping Vulnerability 3.
... context beyond the community level and is frequently contrasted disadvantageously with a more universal and implicitly Western knowledge system (see Bankoff in Chapter 2 and Hilhorst in Chapter 4). Less than adequate attention, too, has ...
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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 |