Seeing like a State: Land Law and Human Mobility after Super Typhoon Haiyan (original) (raw)
Related papers
Exploring land governance in post-disaster: a case of informal settlement
2015
SUMMARY Land is the fundamental element for shelter, protection, livelihood and early recovery from disasters such as earthquakes, floods and landslides. The effects of these disasters have direct consequences for the social, economic, legal and cultural life of the people surviving these disasters. These consequences can lead to human, structural and financial losses. The land issues are pertinent in terms of human vulnerability because land policies, and laws in access and allocation of land determine vulnerability of human beings during natural hazards. In this context, land governance – referred to as policies, rules, processes in access and allocation of land- plays significant role on the pre-disaster as well as post-disaster settings. The informal settlement is often considered as the outcome of weak land governance and it becomes more pertinent in the post-disaster settings. Basically, the proliferation of informal settlement as well as increased risk of vulnerability of exi...
Crossing Borders. Governing Environmental Disasters in a Global Urban Age in Asia and the Pacific, 2018
This multidisciplinary book examines the diverse ways in which environmental disasters with compounding impacts are being governed as they traverse sovereign territories across rapidly urbanising societies in Asia and the Pacific. Combining theoretical advances with contextually rich studies, the book examines efforts to tackle the complexities of cross-border environmental governance. In an urban age in which disasters are not easily contained within neatly delineated jurisdictions, both in terms of their interconnected causalities and their cascading effects, governance structures and mechanisms are faced with major challenges related to cooperation, collaboration and information sharing. This book helps bridge the gap between theory and practice by offering fresh insights and contrasting explanations for variations in transboundary disaster governance regimes among urbanising populations in the Asia-Pacific.
Care and Sovereignty: Territorial Control and the Decolonization of Disaster Risk Reduction
Items - SSRC, 2020
Manuel Tironi and Sarah Kelly draw attention to the ways in which Indigenous communities in Chile are leveraging Territorial Control to prevent the spread of Covid-19 for the “Covid-19 and the Social Sciences” series. Rather than relying on the logics of epidemiology to support these preventive actions, communities are appealing to the logics of sovereignty. While cautious about the temptation to draw simplistic and extractive “lessons learned” for Disaster Risk Reduction from the actions of the Mapuche and other Indigenous peoples, the authors describe how the lessons to be learned are about the need to decolonize disaster response, and to acknowledge the deep histories and shared knowledge that can provide communities with the resources to make effective public health and safety decisions for their people. https://items.ssrc.org/covid-19-and-the-social-sciences/disaster-studies/care-and-sovereignty-territorial-control-and-the-decolonization-of-disaster-risk-reduction/
Do disaster mitigation policies really reduce the impact of disasters and create more resilient cities? Both conventional wisdom and academic literature suggest that the presence of disaster related legislation create resilient communities by institutionalizing preparation and planning as a component of day to day governance (Ndille and Belle 2014; Jiang 2013, Ye et al 2012; Shi 2012; Norio et al 2011). This view, however, is more an ideal than praxis in many states, particularly in fledgling democracies that have yet to contend with stabilizing economic and political institutions, as well as in polities with preexisting vulnerabilities such as poverty and social marginalization. This paper argues that the presence of disaster risk reduction legislation per se is not what mitigates the negative impact of disasters but the basics such as mechanisms that empower people and redistribute assets across social structures, infrastructures that spur economic activities and create livelihood, and institutions that ensure the accountability of those who create and implement policies. I show this by examining the evolution, adoption, and implementation of the Philippine disaster risk reduction framework encompassed in the RA10121 and related policies that mainstream DRRM into decision making and encourage or promote the use of modern technology such as ICT. I analyze these efforts and point out the inconsistencies and disconnects in RA10121 and extant policies—disconnects that make the whole attempt towards a holistic approach towards DRRM fall short of resilience. The paper concludes with some recommendations to harmonize and consolidate these efforts towards a more adaptive, resilient and responsive disaster framework.
Existing disaster studies scholarship tends to uncritically privilege official institutional responses to disasters over bottom-up, community-based reactions and adaptations in the longer term. Meanwhile, the state-recognized disasters mostly exclude socioeconomic and environmental contradictions that generate disasters by making people vulnerable in the first place. Discussion of disaster justice, then, is limited to the immediate state responses to understanding disasters as natural episodes, often incorporating distributive justice into its policy responses. A more spatialized understanding of disaster justice should move beyond these dual limitations—constraints in defining disasters as isolated episodes and in planning for recovery as only emergency responses—and pay attention to the socio-spatial production of risk. This approach would better attend to underlying societal vulnerabilities created through urbanization, in this case, of the indigenous peoples of Taiwan. A spatialized understanding of disaster justice guides this research to attend to both the reoccurring displacements of indigenous people from where their socioeconomic–ecological relations were embedded and the systematic production of risk that has been reinforced and exacerbated by inadequate land use planning. Based on a study of two indigenous groups in Southern Taiwan, Kucapungane and Makazayazaya, this paper explains disaster justice from the indigenous context wrought by multiple expropriations and displacements from the 1930s onwards. This paper plans to do two things: First, it will investigate bottom-up responses to a series of historical disaster-driven migration/urbanization through theories of community resilience. Secondly, it will expand understanding of “disasters” by taking into account the state-led relocation projects as human-made disasters and examine how they have contributed to the vulnerability of the indigenous communities under climate change. It will contribute to a better understanding of disaster justice that overcomes the dual limitations and opens up opportunities for alternative research and practices.
It is now generally appreciated that what constitutes vulnerability to one person is not necessarily perceived as such by the next. Different actors 'see' disasters as different types of events and as a result they prepare for, manage and record them in very different ways. This paper explores what different perceptions of vulnerability mean in terms of the understanding and practices of two significant sets of actors and stakeholders involved in disaster preparedness and management in the Philippines: the state and NGOs. Approaches to disaster are not just a function of people's perceptions of disaster risk but also of their understanding of the prevailing social order and social relations. Despite a shared vocabulary-which increasingly presents disasters as processes rather than events, takes a proactive rather than a reactive approach, and favours the inclusion of stakeholders rather than solely relying on technocratic management-different realities continue to make for different responses.
Some disaster-food connections are obvious: floodwaters devastate roads, thereby interrupting the flow of food from producers to consumers; typhoon winds prevent fisherfolk from going out in their boats; and international food aid inundates local markets after major disasters. We believe that other food-disaster linkages are subtler, deeper, and perhaps more significant. This paper is a preliminary investigation into the critical roles that natural hazards can play in affecting the food security of a community, region, or state. We argue that, in a part of the world that experiences frequent and intense natural hazards such as thePhilippines (Bankoff 2007), food and disasters are necessarily connected. Moreover, we contend that the food sovereignty concept, with certain caveats, is the most appropriate theoretical frame for analyzing this connection. This paper aims to synthesize relevant literature in the matters discussed above. Our objectives are (1) to contextualize the assertion that food sovereignty is a better concept than food security for dealing with the food-disaster connection, using specific examples in the Philippines; and (2) to demonstrate that two key principles of food sovereignty—emphasis on the local and self-sufficiency—need to be rethought and even temporarily suspended in preparation for, during, and after a disaster. The paper is based primarily on secondary data published in academic and grey literature. Given our linguistic limitations, our assertions and analyses are necessarily biased toward written accounts published in English.
Law, Property and Disasters, 2021
This book reconsiders property law for a future of environmental disruption. As slogans such as "build the wall" or "stop the boats" affect public policy, there are counter-questions as to whether positivist or statist notions of property are fit for purpose in a time of human mobility and environmental disruption. State-centric property laws construct legal fictions of sovereign control over land, notwithstanding the persistent reality of informal settlements in many parts of the Global South. In a world affected by catastrophic disasters, this book develops a vision of adaptive governance for property in land based on a critical re-assessment of state-centric property law. This book will appeal to a broad readership with interests in legal theory, property law, adaptive governance, international development, refugee studies, postcolonial studies, and natural disasters.