Engendering disaster risk management and resilience-building: The significance of the everyday in evaluations of the exceptional

Abstract

This article argues for greater consideration of 'the everyday' within evaluations of 'the exceptional' and presents this as a practical means of engendering disaster risk reduction and management (DRRM) and resilience-building. Building on scholarship from feminist geography, gender and development and feminist political ecology, it charts a new way of theorising disaster risk and resilience from a gendered perspective through the analytic of the everyday, and substantiates this with findings from ethnographic research conducted between 2016 and 2017 in disaster-prone informal settlements in the Philippines. As this case reveals, a focus on the everyday helps to uncover the multiple subjective embodiments of risk and insecurity and the structural systems that underpin related inequalities and exclusions. Crucially, the lens of 'the everyday' also exposes the social reproductive labours and power hierarchies embedded in community-based DRRM and resilience-building programmes; insights which are vital to advancing more inclusive, sustainable and socially just approaches to disaster risk governance and climate change adaptation.

‘Forgotten crises’ as forgotten sites of knowledge production for building lasting peace

“…Starting with their local knowledge of overlapping crises is a necessary foundation for rethinking and transforming contemporary competitiveness in humanitarianism. Rather than continuing with representations of ‘exceptionality’, we can begin actually to comprehend crises as being ‘everyday’, interrelated, and cumulative (see Ramalho (2020) for a similar point). In practice, this means greater cohesiveness and coordination among humanitarian actors.…”

Women environmental human rights defenders in Nepal and the Philippines: unpacking the (mal)development–disaster risk relationship through lived experiences

“…This depoliticized framing of disasters shapes the way in which DRR policies and programmes are designed and implemented, and it tends to privilege top-down decisions guided by technical knowledge. In other words, mainstream DRR approaches focus on addressing the symptoms rather than the root causes of vulnerability to disasters (Gaillard, 2010;Ramalho, 2020).…”

Media and non-media sources for disaster risk reduction

“…However, women and children are the most vulnerable in the face of disasters due to the existing socio-economic inequalities (Le Masson et al, 2016;Peterman et al, 2020;Sattar, 2016). The vulnerability of women can be reduced by enhancing their ability to prepare for disasters, their ability to cope with them, and their capacity to recover (Ramalho, 2020;Vaidya et al, 2019). Successful DRR actions emphasis on capacity building, inclusive knowledge and equity (Klein et al, 2019;Shah et al, 2019).…”