Vulnerability and disasters

Question 1

What is Vulnerability?

Answer 1

The extent to which people or households are at risk of experiencing hardship

Question 2

What is the trouble with asset based-approaches?

Answer 2

Does not account for the fact that not everyone has the same access and availability of assets

Question 3

What is a shock?

Answer 3

A disruption from the normal

Question 4

What are disasters?

Answer 4

A combination of social, political and economic environments

Question 5

Why is there no such thing as a “natural disaster”?

Answer 5

• Natural hazards and human actions combine to make a disaster
• ‘Natural’ disasters implies that social circumstances are not implicated

Question 6

Who pioneered at asset based approaches?

Answer 6

Carter, 2005

Question 7

What is meant by “upwardly mobile” poor?

Answer 7

Those who are able to recover from poverty traps

Question 8

What is the trouble with asset based approaches?

Answer 8

They are part of a neoliberal paradigm that transfers the responsibility to individuals, households and communities, away from the state

Question 9

Is the social predisposition to disasters even?

Answer 9

No, it is heterogenous across the same physical space

therefore disasters are socially, not naturally created

Question 10

In what ways are disasters gendered?

Answer 10

Men are prioritised when escaping disasters (Enarson and Morrow 1997)

Question 11

What are two key texts arguing and showing that famines are caused by social/econ/political factors?

Answer 11

Sen 1981

Davis 2001 (more empirical data)

Question 12

What is the problem with viewing hazards as an “exceptional situation”?

Answer 12

Makes it sound like the state should not have any involvement etc

Question 13

What parallels are there between natural disasters and the anthropocene from an epistemological point of view?

Answer 13

Natural Scientists have framed both disasters and the anthropocene as their responsibility (see Malm and Hornborg 2014)

Question 14

Is there some element of nature involved in disasters under any political economic system?

Answer 14

Yes, some people will live close to volcanoes, beaches etc

Yet often this is because they are dependent on the land for incomes still

(so even though the political economy may not play a role in terms of vulnerability, it does in terms of dependency)

Question 15

When did disaster risk reduction become more mainstream?

Answer 15

1990s

Question 16

What issue did DRR raise in the 1990s which continues today?

Answer 16

Countries did not abide by responsibilities to protect communities against disasters

Question 17

What is the problem with conditional cash transfers?

Answer 17

The condition bit…

Induces neoliberal governmentality (Manley et al., 2012)

Question 18

What is a good aspect of conditional cash transfers?

Answer 18

Sometimes conditions include the state promising employment, otherwise they’ll give you money (not much though)

Question 19

What have cash transfers highlighted?

Answer 19

That neoliberal concerns of misuse of donated money are unfounded (because people do use the cash responsibly)

Question 20

What are Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) referred to as? Why?

Answer 20

“Post-neoliberal policies”

Because state is involved, but nevertheless working for the market forces

Question 21

What is the problem with education and training in the context of social protection?

Answer 21

Education and training are of little use when the labour market is in surplus to demand, so there is a race to the bottom (Ferguson 2015)

Need a structural solution instead

Question 22

What is a good connection between social protection and citizenship?

Answer 22

• ID cards needed during Pakistan flood relief efforts 2011
• Those without ID felt like rightful citizens still
• Relief was discursively reconstructed

(Siddiqi 2018)