Disaster Risk Reduction in the Era of “Homeland Security”: The Struggle for Precautionary, Preventive, and Non-violent Approaches

Abstract

This chapter introduces disaster risk reduction (DRR) with an emphasis on the socio-economic sources of human exposure and vulnerability to environmental hazards, the institutional nature of responses, and why DRR is, or should be, aligned with precautionary, prudential, and preventive fields. Internationally, such views have been promoted through the 2005 UN Hyogo Framework for Action and updated in the 2015 Sendai Framework (SFDRR). However, the future of these initiatives turns on whether various emerging contradictions can be resolved. First, as is widely reported, environmental disaster numbers and losses continue to grow—despite several decades of concerted international action and large increases in disaster-related funding and institutions. Second, if DRR has support in the international arena, other approaches receive much larger shares of funding, official promotion, and media coverage. In North America and some other jurisdictions, Homeland Security has integrated disaster management into broad national security complexes, and subordinates it to agencies focused on counter-terrorism and concerns ranging from trafficking to border security. Expanded environmental and social surveillance are involved. Emergency suspensions of civil rights and safety laws are common and a boost to militarized crisis response, which is already predominant in most countries. These form the basis of the so-called Security-Industrial Complex (SIC). It is associated with the aggressive treatment of threats or “securitization”. A politics of crisis places disaster risk within broad, centrally controlled, state and transnational priorities. The consequences were evident in New Orleans after Hurricane “Katrina”, in Haiti since 2010, and in Fukushima, Japan, among others. The SIC reinstates a threat-based or agent-specific “physicalist” view of disasters, and a civil defense or “state-of-war” approach, aimed at damage control. It serves to boost disaster opportunism. By contrast, DRR requires a non-aggressive, open, and conciliatory approach focused on those most at risk. As a result, the disasters community and plans to revise or replace the Hyogo Framework for Action by 2015 face an up-hill struggle. The need to reinforce and extend risk-reducing and humanitarian principles is stressed. Similar, “securitized” dilemmas link DRR with climate change, global migration, and sustainability issues.