In this book, authors Lee Bosher and Ksenia Chmutina argue that to achieve better design and construction of the built environment to withstand and recover from catastrophic risks, a wider range of stakeholders need to become involved in developing more proactive strategies. A key contrast in the volume is between whether disaster risk reduction considerations are brought forward into project conception and design and company policy or whether risk reduction is an afterthought. The volume develops a series of guilding principles for developing a "A holistic multi‐hazard/threat and multi‐stakeholder approach," with the goal of increasing the relience of the built environment to catastrophic events. The book covers a range of hydro-meteorological and geological risks.
In Disaster By Choice (Oxford University Press, 2020), Ilan Kelman begins with a grim account of the 2010 Haitian earthquake. The devastating impact of this "natural disaster," he argues, ultimately depended on "entrenched disaster vulnerabilities" that are man-made (14). Turning to episodes of wildfires and flooding in other parts of the world, he argues that natural events "become hazardous only when faced by an unnprepared society" (40). Hazards are "made" by human choice. But he also asks "whose choice?" He writes that "[v]ulnerability and poverty feed off each ofther through a lack of resources which prevents people from having choices that, if acted on, would helpt to reduce their vulnerability" (78). For example, the poor often have little choice in migrating to areas prone to hazard. As a result, responding to vulnerability requires "identifying the people, groups, politics, power games and social structures responsible for decisions to create disaster vulnerability" (95). If vulnerability is produced by choice, it can also be reduced by choice, and Kelman then investigates how certain communities (Seattle, Toronto, villages in Bangladesh) have sought to address earthquake and flooding risks.
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Collapsing bridges and buildings are rare events, but they do repeatedly occur. This book investigates the non-technical--human and institutional--causes of these collapses, and in particular, those factors that lead those who approve, design, maintain or inspect these structures to "neglect their professional standards and/or existing regulation." Investigating four well-documented international cases of building or bridge failure, Seibel finds that the situational causes vary, but he uncovers a common patttern of "normalization of deviance" or "intended ignorance" and weak or absent leadership as common mechanisms of failure. Basically, people did not step up an take responsibility when they had the opportunity to so. He argues that a common feature of these cases is that they exhibit a "responsiveness-responsibility tradeoff," where the responsivness of public officials to other stakeholders eroded their situational sense of responsibility for upholding safety standards.
In "Policy Expertise in Times of Crisis" (Policy & Politics, 52,1: 2-23), Aagaard, Easton and Head explore the challenges that policy advisory systems face in crisis situations. They point out that the "form and content of valued expertise is highly variable" (6) and explore how this variation shapes the quality and character of expert knowledge provided during a crisis. Two key dimensions of variation are whether policy experts are "insiders" or "outsiders" and whether expertise is provided "formally" or "informally." The authors also point out that policy experts may be seen as knowledge "shapers" or knowledge "providers," depending on how actively experts are engaged in proactively mobilzing knowledge. These and other variations in policy expertise may "facilitate or frustrate" productive relationships between experts and politicians during crises (10). This article introduces a special issue of Policy & Politics exploring the role of policy experts during COVID and Climate Change crises. A key lesson from the special issue is that "[g]overnments will choose different paths, but they all need to consider appropriate sources of expert advice during crisis, and who participates in the expertise-shaped policy conversations in crisis situations" (17).
Thomas Beamish explores how public tragedies become political, and often politicized, events. This politicization is triggered, he argues, by a "trauma script" that underlies much politician and media communication about public tragedies. This script builds on a "conventionalized language of victimhood," which is used to "foment outrage" and attribute social blame. In the trauma script "blameless victims are suggested to have suffered from unforeseeable and unnecessary harm, and that harm is socially blamed on the actions or omissions of society..." (p. 12). The mobilizing power of the trauma script depends in part upon on how the tragedy symbolizes a harm that could potentially impact all of us (and not just the victims). Building on this basic idea of the trauma script, Beamish explores political and media coverage in a number of catastrophic events and finds that the trauma script provides an important lens for understanding how these events become politicized. He also examines what he calls "tragic celebrity," where certain victims become iconic of victimhood. His final chapter explores how the media created George Floyd as a "tragic celebrity."
In Disabled Power, Texan (and sociologist) Angela Frederick analyzes her state’s February 2021 power outages, which coincided with a rare arctic blast of cold weather to produce one of the deadliest disasters in the state’s history. The heart of the book’s argument is that critical infrastructure failures impose “disproportionate harm” on the disabled and that this suffering is preventable.
Part of the book focuses on the distinctive challenges the disabled faced, particularly in staying warm. Everyone affected by the power outage faced the challenge of frigid temperatures, but the limited mobility and health conditions of disabled persons often made coping with the cold an existential challenge.
Frederick argues that the disabled have been largely invisible in disaster and crisis studies because of their emphasis on, ironically, vulnerability. She writes that vulnerability is a “totalizing identity, a proxy for complete incapacity” that leads us to dismiss the disaster experiences of disabled persons that do not fit neatly in the dichotomy of vulnerable versus capable (Frederick 2024, 38). According to Frederick, this dichotomy not only obscures the highly varied needs of the disabled, but also overlooks their resourcefulness and their contributions to disaster response.