Reducing disaster risks 1980–2010: Some reflections and speculations
Through personal reflections on themes covering past experiences, the author considers selected experiences of disaster risk management (DRM) that span 30 years of DRM, and makes some speculations concerning the future, and ponders whether within the selected themes the future looks positive or negative. The observations begin with some memories of the Ocho Rios Conference: a multi disciplinary expedition to examine housing and hazards in Pakistan; issues concerning education and training; and finally the success of a massive reconstruction project of rural dwellings in Pakistan following the 2005 earthquake. Some key questions are considered: the value of community-based risk management; the reduction of short- or long-term risks; the protection of critical facilities; whose reality is being addressed? official neglect of education for DRM; the conditions needed to create highly effective safe reconstruction in rural Pakistan.
Series NATURAL DISASTERS , PUBLIC SPENDING , AND CREATIVE DESTRUCTION : A CASE STUDY OF THE PHILIPPINES
Typhoons, floods, and other weather-related shocks can inflict suffering on local populations and create life-threatening conditions for the poor. Yet, natural disasters also present a development opportunity to upgrade capital stock, adopt new technologies, enhance the risk-resiliency of existing systems, and raise standards of living. This is akin to the “creative destruction” hypothesis coined by economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1943 to describe the process where innovation, learning, and growth promote advanced technologies as conventional technologies become outmoded. To test the hypothesis in the context of natural disasters, this paper takes the case of the Philippines—among the most vulnerable countries in the world to such disasters, especially typhoons. Using synthetic panel data regressions, the paper shows that typhoon-affected households are more likely to fall into lower income levels, although disasters can also promote economic growth. Augmenting the household data with municipal fiscal data, the analysis shows some evidence of the creative destruction effect: Municipal governments in the Philippines helped mitigate the poverty impact by allocating more fiscal resources to build local resilience while also utilizing additional funds poured in by the national government for rehabilitation and reconstruction.
Human Rights and Crimes of The State: The Culture of Denial*
Introduction For personal and political reasons that I won't impose on you, I have gradually moved during the last decade from "doing" criminology to "doing" human rights. Living these years in Israel and faced by the mass violation of Palestinian rights in the Israeli Occupied Territories, my academic pre-occupations have made way for more activist work in the human rights field. This has' meant dealing with different subjects from those of traditional criminology or even the broader discourse of the sociologyof law and social control. It has also meant getting used to a different style of work; the rhythms of human rights organisations (deadline, press conference, organising, casework) are not those of the leisurely university life; the genre of a human rights report (as I painfully discovered) is not the same as a paper for an academic journal. This is altogether a different intellectual subculture, with its own people, preoccupations, values and references. Of course, these different worlds do meet. Some subjects appear to be pretty much the same (law, police, prisons, courts, violence, victims, justice ...); there are the familiar debates between practitioners and theorists; research methods are not very different from regular social science work (a shoddy human rights report is bad for the same reasons as a shoddy research paper). The research project on which I have just started working, though, stems more consciously from my human rights involvement than my academic criminology. So, when I was invited to give this lecture, my first thought was that I had nothing much .to say to a criminological audience. On second thoughts, it seemed to me that the ,ways these fields have diverged despite their common grounds seemed worthy of attention. To frame my human rights topic for a criminological audience might be a worthwhile exercise. My lecture has two aims. The first is to note some substantive lines of enquiry about my subject, the sociology of denial. The second is to suggest that the criminological agenda should take into account the subject of crimes of the state and its even wider referent, that is, human rights violations. Pretentiously others before me have tried and failed this second task is comparable to what Sutherland set himself in placing white collar crime on the criminological agenda. Which of these two tasks is more important? Frankly, the first the substance of my question. But in deference to the occasion the John Barry Memorial Lecture at the conference of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology I'll start with my second task, looking for the criminological connection.