Critical Reflections on Disaster Prevention Education, Learning and Calamities: Practices, Interpretations, Patterns, edited by (original) (raw)

This chapter provides a critique of the most common approaches to disaster risk reduction education. It draws from theories of empowerment, inquiry-based learning, factor analysis and content analysis to propose a "framework for disaster prevention education" intended to be a scaffold for effective public education. The framework links micro, macro, and meso level interventions across three spheres of action: assessment and planning, physical and environmental protection (mitigation), and response-capacity development (preparedness). This is to allow social mobilizers to link personal, social and political change, and thereby successfully promote the extensive mobilization needed to reduce human suffering from disasters both large and small. It rests on the understanding that, since disasters are not inherently natural, but involve enormous factors of human causality, they can be largely ameliorated by mitigation, and that response capacity is to fill the gaps to address residual and unforeseen risks. Initial indications of the value of the framework for promoting household and family disaster preparedness, and even school disaster management are promising, though impact testing remains a challenge to be addressed over time. 2 From Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) to Disaster Prevention Education 2.1 The dialectics of disaster prevention DRR education as a field-of-practice draws from the traditions and experience of community Marla Petal 2 organization, sustainable development, environmental stewardship, public health, geography, earth sciences, social studies, and public safety education. Its roots can be clearly discerned around the mid-1980s, pre-dating and then developing alongside the policy-oriented aims of the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR) in the 1990s, and the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA) (2005-2015). The field has its own gray literature, much of which can be found in the more than 2000 entries in the educational materials database of UNISDR's Prevention Web (cf. UNISDR 2013). These are generated from community-development practitioners and humanitarian responders, disaster management agencies, teachers, consultants and citizen-advocates. Prior to the establishment of linkages to official curriculum development, practitioners applied their concerns to small-scale community and sub-national projects focused on response-preparedness, sometimes seeking to incorporate indigenous or "local knowledge," and/or to give voice to children. "Disaster risk reduction" as a field of global policy advocacy has quite different influences, emerging from the early efforts of academic and scientific experts and international governmental organizations, creating a steady stream of peer-reviewed journals and books, and reaching out through conference proceedings and policy guidance materials produced in concert with international agencies and multilateral donors. Both tracks have, for the past half-dozen years, typically referred to the consensusbuilding process represented by the U.N. International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR). In its lexicon a disaster is "A serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society involving widespread human, material, economic or environmental losses and impacts that exceed the ability of the affected community or society to cope using its own resources" (UNISDR 2009, 9). This definition usefully distinguishes disasters from emergencies, the latter having less widespread impacts, and responsible authorities are able to mobilize response, and meet the safety and welfare needs of those affected in a relatively Critical Reflections on Disaster Prevention Education 3 short time. UNISDR makes use of the English language and Latin language distinctions between hazards (of natural and man-made origins) and risks (which also factored in vulnerabilities and capacities). Hazards refer to those hydro-meteorological and geological forces that human beings believe they had little impact on, whereas risks can be averted through vulnerability reduction and capacity development. Whilst this definition may obscure the continuum between everyday emergencies, larger incidents and full-blown disasters, it is functional for the purposes of disaster prevention education. Its chief weakness is the avoidance of any mention of causality. In spite of UNISDR's open-ended definition of disasters, the original HFA focus remained on "natural hazards" and is silent on catastrophes without a "natural" component to blame. And the UNISDR eschews anything related to the risks of violence and terror, for that is the domain of other UN agencies. For social scientists, the impact of politics on terminology and discourse may be ironic and unwelcome, but it can be accommodated. For public educators and field workers, however, it is quite impossible to artificially separate the discourse. During the 1980s and 1990s, the widespread use of the phrase "natural disasters" reinforced the perception that disasters caused by natural hazards were unavoidable and inevitable. These were distinguished from "man-made" disasters, which referred primarily to nuclear, biological and chemical disasters, and were also regarded as unavoidable "accidents." Conflicts were not included at all and came to be referred to as "crises" and "complex emergencies." And "terror" spawned an almost entirely separate enterprise, once it was "recognized" after September 2001. When the IDNDR's mandate was passed on through the HFA to UNISDR in 2005, "disaster risk reduction" replaced "natural disaster reduction", but it was not until 2008 that UNISDR chief Margareta Wahlstrom gave voice at a biennial meeting of the Global Platform for Disaster Reduction to the recognition that "there is no such thing as a 'natural' disaster." Marla Petal 4 The statement went beyond earlier acknowledgement that, for example, poor construction practices result in the preponderance of earthquake deaths, to the inescapable awareness of the myriad of human activities that impact climate, and of the fact that there is little that human beings do not influence. Yet this shift does not signify a comparable adjustment to everyone's scope of practice. The DRR field of practice eschews intruding on the separate