Journal of International Development

J. Int. Dev. 22, 218–232 (2010)

Published online in Wiley InterScience
(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/jid.1675

POLICY ARENA

VULNERABILITY, CAPACITY AND

RESILIENCE: PERSPECTIVES FOR
CLIMATE AND DEVELOPMENT POLICY
J.C. GAILLARD1,2*
1
Université de Grenoble, Grenoble, France
2
University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines

Abstract: In the decades since the terms ‘vulnerability’, ‘capacity’ and ‘resilience’ became
popular in both the disaster and development literatures, through natural and social science
discourses, the terms have been applied to many development- and disaster-related policies
and have been the subject of much debate and interpretation amongst various schools of
thought. An illustrative review of the use of these terms is given followed by a critique of the
main discourses, especially regarding the development and disaster policy advantages and
disadvantages. Recommendations are given at different scales for closing some of the gaps
identified, especially regarding the policy usefulness of certain theoretical approaches.
Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keywords: disaster risk reduction; climate; vulnerability; capacity; resilience; development;

policy

1 INTRODUCTION

The development, climate change and disaster literatures share numerous concepts which
are heavily used by both scientists and policy makers. Three of those concepts stand out by
the frequency of their use and the impact they have on contemporary policy making:
vulnerability, capacity and resilience. These concepts have been particularly strong and
structuring within the disaster risk reduction realm where both the concepts of vulnerability
and capacity emerged back in the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, most international policy
oriented documents have been relying on these concepts to sustain contemporary

*Correspondence to: JC. Gaillard, UMR 5194 Pacte—CNRS, Université de Grenoble, France.
E-mail: [email protected]

Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

 Vulnerability, Capacity, Resilience 219

discourses on sustainable development, climate change mitigation and adaptation and

disaster risk reduction.
As an example, the famous and pioneering so-called Brundtland Report of 1987 quoted
the word vulnerability/vulnerable 47 times in 300 pages (World Commission on
Environment and Development, 1987). More recently, the summary for policy makers of
the International Panel on Climate Change report on Impacts, Adaptation and
Vulnerability, used the concept of vulnerability 30 times and that of capacity 25 times
within only 16 pages (Parry et al., 2007). Similarly, in the six-page long ‘Hyogo
Framework for Action 2005–2015’ of the United Nations (UN) International Strategy for
Disaster Reduction (2005), vulnerability (10 occurrences), capacity (five occurrences) and
resilience (nine occurrences) are the most oft-cited concepts.
In these references, as well as amongst other scientists, policy makers and practitioners,
it seems that these concepts are used in diverging ways, for different purposes and
sometimes out of their original theoretical frameworks. Consequently, field practitioners
seek to tackle conflicting policies, uncoordinated field actions and poor development
progress for the most vulnerable, the least capable and the least resilient in the face of
climate-related hazards (e.g. Global Network of Civil Society Organisations for Disaster
Reduction, 2009; Mercer, 2010).
In this paper, I provide an illustrative review of those three concepts as a mirror of the
larger scientific and policy context (Section 2). That enables identifying gaps between the
advance of scientific knowledge and the often inflexible character of disaster risk reduction
policies at the national level which at the same time inhibit sustainable development in a
context of climate change (Sections 3 and 4). Suggestions are then made to bridge this gap
in the context of the larger development policy context (Section 5).

2 INTRODUCING VULNERABILITY, CAPACITY AND RESILIENCE

The concept of vulnerability was in the disaster literature as early as the 1970s (e.g. Baird
et al., 1975; O’Keefe et al., 1976; Wisner et al., 1977). It then spread quickly in the 1980s,
including into the climate change (e.g. Bohle et al., 1994; Handmer et al., 1999) and
development literature (e.g. Chambers, 1989; Devereux, 2001). The definitions refer to the
susceptibility to suffer damage in a potentially dangerous event, either natural, economic or
political. Vulnerability thus stresses the condition of a society which makes it possible for a
hazard to become a disaster (Cannon, 1994: p. 13).
Despite such broad agreement amongst the authors, significant divergences of
approaches exist. Those differences have been interpreted through several classifications
and typologies (e.g. Timmerman, 1981; D’Ercole, 1998; Wisner, 2004). In its earlier
interpretation, the concept of vulnerability refers to the social construct leading people to
be fragile in the face of natural hazards and food shortages (O’Keefe et al., 1976; Waddell,
1977; Wisner et al., 1977; Sen, 1983). It aims at identifying hazard-independent factors of
vulnerability rooted in macro-scale structural and societal constraints based on qualitative
analysis (Hewitt, 1983; Lewis, 1999; Watts and Bohle, 1993; Wisner et al., 2004).
Other definitions later focused on community or territorial scales to draw vulnerability
maps through the integration of quantitative and qualitative data dealing with the actual
condition of insecurity of people in the face of climate-related and other natural hazards
(e.g. Anderson-Berry, 2003; Birkmann, 2006). This approach emerged with the desire for
measuring vulnerability and making it quantitative for disaster risk reduction and

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development practice. Finally, engineers and earth scientists have also used the concept of
vulnerability to compute quantitative indices of potential losses of built structures should a
damaging event occur (e.g. Stewart, 2003; Kemp, 2007). Based on these different
approaches, some models have been proposed to further frame the concept. Some of the
most famous include the Pressure and Release model first suggested by Davis (1984) and
then popularised by Blaikie et al. (1994); the Space of Vulnerability model of Watts and
Bohle (1993); and Hewitt and Burton’s (1971) ‘hazardousness of a place’ approach which
has continually been reinterpreted in different forms in later literature.
The concept of capacity (as itself and not associated with other concepts such as in the
expression ‘capacity to resist’, ‘to face’, ‘to recover’, etc.) emerged from practitioners in
the late 1980s (Anderson and Woodrow, 1989). It reflects the increased recognition of
people’s ability to face climate-related and other natural hazards which was not captured in
the mainly negative concept of vulnerability. Capacities refer to the resources and assets
people possess to resist, cope with and recover from disaster shocks they experience (Davis
et al., 2004). The concept of capacity also encompasses the ability to either use and access
needed resources and thus goes beyond the sole availability of these resources (Kuban and
MacKenzie-Carey, 2001). Capacities are not the opposite end of vulnerability on a single
spectrum, because highly vulnerable communities may display a large array of capacities
(Davis et al., 2004).
Capacities are often rooted in resources which are endogenous to the community and
which rely on traditional knowledge, indigenous skills and technologies and solidarity
networks. In contrast, vulnerabilities often depend on structural constraints which are
exogenous to the community, such as unequal distribution of wealth and resources within
the society, market forces, political systems and governance. In that sense, they relate to the
academic concept of subculture. Anderson (1965: p. 3) defined a disaster subculture as
‘those subcultural patterns operative in a given area which are geared towards the solution
of problems, both social and non-social, arising from the awareness of some form of almost
periodic disaster threat’ and added that ‘a community’s disaster subculture serves as a
blueprint for individual and group behaviour before, during and after the impact of the
disaster agent’.
The ways in which capacities are mobilised in times of crisis reflect coping strategies.
Coping strategies refer to the manner in which people and organisations use existing
resources to achieve various beneficial ends during unusual, abnormal and adverse
conditions of a disaster phenomenon or process (United Nations International Strategy for
Disaster Reduction, 2002). The concept of capacity has also been long used in connection
with the ability to face ecological changes (Holling, 1973) and, more recently, the impact
of climate change as emphasised in the definitions of resilience and vulnerability of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Parry et al., 2007) which explicitly
references ‘adaptive capacity’.
The concept of resilience emerged in the climate and disaster literature in the 1970s (e.g.
Torry, 1979a), then mirroring parallel use in child psychology (e.g. Werner et al., 1971),
engineering (e.g. Gordon, 1978) and ecology (e.g. Holling, 1973). It then spread widely in
the 1990s and is still the object of a conceptual debate around its sense and application
among social scientists (e.g. Manyena, 2006). Pelling (2003: p. 48) views resilience as a
component of vulnerability or the ability of an actor to cope with or adapt to hazard stress.
That includes the planned preparation and the spontaneous or premeditated adjustments
undertaken in the face of natural hazards. Others (e.g. SOPAC c, 2002) interpret resilience
as the ‘flip’—positive—side of vulnerability or the ability to resist damage and change in

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 Vulnerability, Capacity, Resilience 221

the event of the occurrence of a climate-related or other natural hazard. A third approach
breaks away from the previous two to define resilience as the capacity of a system to absorb
and recover from the occurrence of a hazardous event (Timmerman, 1981: p. 21).
The United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (2002) adopted this
approach in its definition of resilience as ‘the capacity of a system, community or society to
resist or change in order that it may obtain an acceptable level of functioning and
structure’. Considering that resisting to change may be one way among others to
overcoming disasters is problematic as it brings back the social system to the pre-event
state of vulnerability which leads to the disaster (Manyena, 2006). It thus conflicts with
development policy suggesting that post-disaster reconstruction should be an opportunity
to build back better and foster development (e.g. Anderson and Woodrow, 1989;
Christoplos, 2006). Changes—social, cultural, economic or political—may therefore be
viewed as a pre-requisite to achieving resilience.

3 FROM THEORETICAL CONCEPTS TO SCIENTIFIC PARADIGMS

The progressive emergence of the three concepts of vulnerability, capacity and resilience
mirrors a critical paradigm evolution amongst academics. The paradigm which has long
dominated scientific studies of disasters emphasises the importance of Nature’s threats,
called natural hazards. This approach has been spearheaded by White’s (1945) pioneering
dissertation on people’s adjustments in the face of flooding in the US. This paradigm is
known as the hazard paradigm. Burton and Kates (1964: p. 413), two of White’s students,
define natural hazards as ‘those elements in the physical environment, harmful to man and
caused by forces extraneous to him’. Frampton et al. (2000) further stress the
‘uncontrollable dimension’ of the physical event while Chapman (1994) mentions ‘rare
and extreme natural phenomena greatly exceeding human expectation in terms of its
magnitude and frequency’. Many more definitions of natural hazards similarly emphasise
extreme (function of magnitude) and rare (function of time) natural phenomena that exceed
human’s ability to resist.
The ‘extraneous’ and extreme dimension of natural hazards thus leads disasters
identified with these natural phenomena to being considered out of the regular social fabric
(e.g. Kates and Clark, 1996). Scientists, institutions, governments and media thus often
mention ‘extra-ordinary’, ‘un-controllable’, ‘in-credible’, ‘un-predictable’ and ‘un-
certain’ phenomena along with ‘un-expected’ disasters and ‘un-scheduled’ and ‘un-
anticipated’ damage (see Hewitt, 1983 for a critique). Regions affected are unable to face
such forces of Nature and often those which are considered ‘under-developed’, ‘over-
populated’, ‘un-informed’, ‘un-prepared’ and ‘un-planned’ (again see Hewitt, 1983 for a
critique). Therefore, a clear and brutal border is manufactured between regions of the world
which are often struck by disastrous events and those which are supposed to be safe (see
Bankoff, 2001 for a critique).
In this context, earth and climate scientists and engineers tend to aim at understanding,
monitoring and predicting extreme natural events. They rely on probabilistic models and
the latest available technological devices. Social scientists further focus on how people and
societies perceive the danger and how they adjust to rare and extreme threats. Individuals
and societies with a low perception of risk allegedly adjust poorly to the threat. People and
societies with a high risk perception are assumed to adjust well (Kates, 1971; Burton et al.,
1978; Fischhoff et al., 1978; Slovic, 1987). Factors which affect people’s perception of risk

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222 J. C. Gaillard

are hazard-related too, i.e. hazard magnitude, duration, frequency and temporal spacing,
plus the recentness, frequency and intensity of past personal experiences with hazards.
Kates (1971: p. 441) underlines that those factors are independent from the socio-economic
environment.
The emergence of the concept of vulnerability in the 1970s, and later those of capacity
and resilience, reflects a critical evolution in the way disasters have been considered and
faced (Waddell, 1977; Torry, 1979b). Drawing on cases from the developing world,
scholars such as O’Keefe et al. (1976), Wisner et al. (1977) and Hewitt (1983) increasingly
emphasise people’s vulnerability in the face of natural hazards, coined the vulnerability
paradigm. Vulnerability in facing natural hazards reflects people’s marginalisation within
society. Disaster-affected people are disproportionately drawn from the segments of the
society which are chronically marginalised in daily life (Wisner, 1993; Wisner et al., 2004;
Gaillard, 2007). Disaster-affected people are marginalised geographically because they
live in hazardous places (e.g. informal settlers); socially because they are members of
minority groups (e.g. ethnic or caste minorities, disabled individuals, prisoners and
refugees); economically because they are poor (e.g. homeless and jobless); and politically
because their voice is disregarded (e.g. women, non-heterosexuals, children, and elderly)
by those with political power. People’s vulnerability varies in time and space and is
determined by hazard independent, structural constraints which are social, cultural,
economic and political (Watts and Bohle, 1993; Wisner et al., 2004; Gaillard, 2007).
Disasters thus hit individuals with limited and fragile incomes (low wages, informal
jobs, lack of savings) that reduce the capability to deal with natural hazards (location of
home, type of housing, knowledge of protection measures), thereby inhibiting
development processes. Vulnerability and marginality also result from inadequate social
protection (health insurance, health services, construction rules, prevention measures, etc.)
and limited solidarity networks.
The failure of entitlement does not mean that means of protection are unavailable
locally. In many instances, such as for famines (Hartmann and Boyce, 1983; Sen, 1983;
Watts and Bohle, 1993), lack of capacity does not reflect the lack of food, knowledge,
technologies or financial capital, but rather an unequal distribution of available resources
and the nature, strength and diversity of people’s livelihoods. Assets and resources
essential in the sustainability or un-sustainability of livelihoods are conversely crucial in
defining vulnerability. Such an intimate relationship between livelihood and vulnerability
justifies that many people have no other choice but to face natural hazards to sustain their
daily needs. The difficulty of accessing sustainable livelihoods may further lead to
environmental degradation which often materialises in increasing natural hazards; for
instance, the need for firewood aggravates deforestation which in return exacerbates
landslides and floods.
People’s incapacity to safely face climate-related and other natural hazards therefore
results from their inability to control their daily life and to choose the location of their home
and their livelihoods (Blaikie, 1985). In that context, disasters highlight or amplify people’s
daily hardship and everyday emergencies (Baird et al., 1975; Maskrey, 1989). Disastrous
events can thus not be considered as accidents beyond the usual functioning of the society
(Hewitt, 1983; Wisner, 1993). Instead, disasters reflect development failure where the root
causes of vulnerability merge with the origins of other development-related crises.
The concepts of capacity and resilience further reflect the emergence of the vulnerability
paradigm. People’s capacities emphasise that those affected by disasters should not be
considered as helpless victims whose risk perception should be changed from the outside.

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Instead, development policy should use people’s capacities to help the people themselves
to rebuild and to reduce future disaster risk.

4 FROM SCIENCE TO POLICY AND PRACTICE: THE MISSING LINK

The concepts of vulnerability, capacity and resilience played a pivotal role in the
progressive emergence of the vulnerability paradigm within the scientific realm.
Eventually, some of the central ideas of the vulnerability paradigm were progressively
integrated into some, but not all, international policy documents such as UN strategies
(United Nations International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction, 1994; United
Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, 2005, 2009). Numerous NGOs
focusing on development, climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction have also
adopted ideas from the vulnerability paradigm, translating them into sound policies (e.g.
http://www.globalnetwork-dr.org/). Conversely, some obviously more powerful institu-
tions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have not yet integrated the bottom-line
arguments of the vulnerability paradigm (Freeman et al., 2003) while others such as the
World Trade Organization (WTO) downplay the negative effect of disasters on
development (World Trade Organization, 2006).
If international policies are slowly changing, their influence on national policies and
practice remain limited. The latest report of the Global Network of Civil Society
Organisations for Disaster Reduction (2009) shows that the recommendations of the
United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (2005) are actually not
‘trickling down’ to local communities threatened and affected by disasters. In fact, the
United Nations and the NGOs have a limited influence to foster appropriate disaster risk
reduction policies at the national level. This is of particular worry since the implementation
of policies intended to reduce disaster risks is the primary and sovereign responsibility of
national governments. In many countries, disaster and development policies and practices
still reflect the influence of the hazard paradigm. These policies are primarily geared
towards the extreme dimension of natural phenomena and often reflect war strategies
(Gilbert, 1995). In many countries, disaster policies are handled by the army or civil
protection institutions, relying on military chains of command and treating climate-related
and other natural hazards as enemies to fight against (Alexander, 2002).
Risk reduction strategies thus focus on technocratic, command-and-control measures
such as engineering structures, technology-based warning systems, hazard-based land-use
planning and hazard-based risk awareness campaigns. Internationally, disaster risk
reduction policies have long relied on the above-mentioned regional geography of disasters
opposing safe, affluent countries with dangerous, poor countries. That fits into wider
development policies which foster top-down transfers of knowledge, technology and
experience from the rich to the poor, because the poor countries are allegedly unable to
cope without external assistance (Hewitt 1995; de Waal, 1997; Bankoff, 2001). Disaster
risk reduction can therefore be viewed as a neo-colonial activity superimposed by
regulation overseen by the most affluent states.
This top-down hazard paradigm now seems to be regaining ground, fuelled by the media,
political and scientific discourse on climate change (Kelman and Gaillard, 2008).
Uncertainties around the evolution of climate conditions constitute a powerful argument
for the proponents of the hazard paradigm for considering Nature as the major threat (e.g.
White, 2004). Uncertainties are indeed frequently associated to the probability of

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224 J. C. Gaillard

occurrence of rare and extreme natural hazards which should be addressed through
scientific models and statistical probabilities. The contemporary focus on climate change
thus reinforces a paradigm where Nature is the danger source (even if exacerbated by
human activity, as with climate change and other hazards) and where people have to adjust /
adapt to that threat. Yet people’s capacities to cope with this threat are largely overlooked,
even though constrained by the same development-related factors underpinning
vulnerability (Bohle et al., 1994).
The influence of the climate change discourse on disaster and development policies, and
the corruption of the concepts of vulnerability, capacity and resilience are evident in the
latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007). In this document,
vulnerability is defined as ‘the degree to which a system is susceptible to, and unable to
cope with, adverse effects of climate change, including climate variability and extremes.
Vulnerability is a function of the character, magnitude and rate of climate change and
variation to which a system is exposed, its sensitivity, and its adaptive capacity’. This
definition emphasises extreme events and dependence on climate features, especially the
magnitude of change to be experienced, which are both characteristics of the hazard
paradigm.
Such a scientific discourse on climate change, highly emphasised by the media, distracts
national governments from the root causes of vulnerability. National authorities further
find in climate change a perfect scapegoat for the occurrence of disasters and the
inhabitation of development (Kelman and Gaillard, 2008). Pinpointing a phenomenon of
global scale and diffused responsibility enables governments to evade their own
responsibility in addressing the root causes of vulnerability. Therefore, the blame for often
inflexible national policies and practice can be attributed to both the academic proponents
of the hazard paradigm, including those who emphasise the importance of climate change,
and national governments which often fail to implement changing international policies
such as those of the UN and many grassroots NGOs.

5 BRIDGING THE GAP: INTEGRATING BOTTOM-UP AND TOP-DOWN

Bridging the gap between the advance of scientific knowledge, international policies
and local practice, in the larger context of climate change adaptation within
development, requires re-affirming the theoretical principles on which policies claim to
be inspired by. The needed measures must be sensitive to local geographic, social,
economic and political contexts in order to respond to needs that vary amongst locations,
contexts and individuals. No single, miracle solution can fit everywhere; however, a
general concept does seem to apply universally: enhancing capacities, reducing
vulnerability and building resilience requires increasing participation of local commu-
nities, as has long been encouraged in development research, policy and practice (e.g.
Chambers, 1983; Wisner, 1995).
Local communities nearly always constitute the first line of defence in reducing
vulnerability and building resilience. A wide consensus acknowledges the capacities of
local communities in dealing with climate-related and other natural hazards on their own,
as long as they are empowered with adequate resources (e.g. Quarantelli and Dynes, 1972;
Delica-Willison and Willison, 2004). Community-Based Disaster Risk Reduction
(CBDRR) fosters the participation of threatened communities in the evaluation and
reduction of risk (including hazards, vulnerability, capacities and resiliences).

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CBDRR empowers communities with self-developed and culturally, socially and

economically acceptable ways of coping with and avoiding crises related to natural hazards
(e.g. Anderson and Woodrow, 1989; Maskrey, 1989). CBDRR thus enhances endogenous
resources which prevent people from resorting to exogenous means which are often hard to
access and which often create a cycle of dependency. CBDRR further aims at strengthening
people’s livelihoods to enable local communities to live with risk on an everyday basis
(Benson et al., 2001; Cannon et al., 2003; Twigg, 2004), thus favouring the integration of
disaster risk reduction into development policy and planning. It is actually often impossible
to prevent people from settling in hazardous areas, because these same locations often
provide resources on a daily basis, as in the case of fertile floodplains and coastal zones
with fisheries. Focusing on livelihoods simultaneously addresses people’s ability to sustain
their daily needs and their capacities to face climate-related and other natural hazards.
CBDRR is also increasingly promoted among local governments and scientific
communities in order to strengthen the links between top-down and bottom-up disaster-
related measures (Kafle and Murshed, 2006) and to facilitate their integration into wider
development policy frameworks. Top-down actions should support, rather substitute for,
community capacities. Local communities should indeed be externally assisted when
large-scale tasks are essential, such as massive evacuations over long distances, major
medical operations and considerable debris cleaning. CBDRR accepts external assistance
when appropriate on the community’s terms.
The Philippines has long been a strong proponent of CBDRR (Heijmans and Victoria,
2001). Throughout the archipelago, CBDRR has been initiated at the grassroots level by
local NGOs partnered with the Citizens’ Disaster Response Center (CDRC). CBDRR was
then boosted in the early 1990s when a series of disasters struck the country, notably several
powerful typhoons. As Heijmans (2009: p. 4) states, CBDRR in the Philippines ‘means not
only addressing people’s immediate survival and recovery needs, but includes long-term
strategies to transform social and political structures in society which generate
vulnerability’. In that sense, it fully engages in addressing the root causes of disasters
and in integrating disaster risk reduction into development policy and planning.
Today in the Philippines, CBDRR scales up to governmental institutions. Many local
governments are progressively integrating community-based activities and programmes
into their disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation and development policies in
order to deal with vulnerability, capacity and resilience (Asian Disaster Preparedness
Center, 2006; Luneta and Molina, 2008). Nationally, the National Disaster Coordinating
Council stresses the need for government agencies to collaborate with local and
international NGOs to address priority cross-cutting issues in development (e.g. population
age, diversity, environment, gender, human rights) at the community level (National
Disaster Coordinating Council, 2007). In parallel, a coalition of NGOs and academics has
pressured the Filipino national government to pass a new disaster risk reduction bill which
emphasises the importance of CBDRR. Among the most affluent countries, examples of
CBDRR implementation are Australia and the UK (Coles and Buckle, 2004), Japan (Bajek
et al., 2008) and the US (Flint and Brennan, 2006).
CBDRR and other locally driven measures are crucial for development policy; however,
these should be backed by a strong commitment from national and international
institutions, especially those which have not yet incorporated the central arguments of the
vulnerability paradigm (e.g. IMF, WTO). Too many disasters are rooted in disobedience of
laws such as building codes, corruption and the misuse of available resources, or the looting
of natural and economic resources to benefit the most powerful (e.g. Wisner, 2001; Gaillard

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et al., 2007; Lewis, 2008). In most cases, simple, affordable and locally available measures
as part of development policy would avoid disasters (Hewitt, 2007).
Obstacles to dealing with vulnerability, capacity and resilience thus reflect the social
injustice and poor governance prevailing in most disaster-affected locales. Governance
refers to the larger relationships between governments and the people—the ideology,
values and authority imposed on the latter; the distribution of power within the society and
the level of priority given to disaster and development topics (Wisner et al., 2004).
Amongst the many development challenges it faces and perpetuates, the Colombian
government has some good practices for improving governance for disaster risk reduction.
It fosters the systematic integration of disaster risks into land use and development
planning, usually with emphasis on community participation (Cardona Arboleda, 1997;
Sistema Nacional de Prevención y Atención de Desastres, 2008). Illegal settlers can benefit
from public services such as access to electricity, water and sewage and, should they be
evicted, they sometimes have supportive resettlement programmes.
Local governments are also often proactive. The city of Manizales suffers from recurrent
landslides during heavy rainfall. The municipal government has developed a large and
integrated programme of disaster risk reduction encompassing hazard mapping,
infrastructure and regular cleaning and monitoring of drainage systems. The programme
stabilises landslide-prone areas while reducing vulnerability through social services and
supportive relocation programmes for the poor settlers who occupy the steepest slopes
(Olave et al., 2007; Lavell, 2009).
Within development policy worldwide, these examples of government initiatives in
Colombia and grassroots action in the Philippines, remain relatively sparse. Addressing the
root causes of climate-related and other disasters within development policy still requires
both a push from below and a drive from above.

6 CLOSING RECOMMENDATIONS

Frameworks for integrating bottom-up and top-down actions are not specific to disaster risk
reduction, appearing in development policy and climate change literature too (e.g.
Chambers, 1995; Shea, 2001, 2003; O’Brien et al., 2006). Despite obvious similarities in
the concepts used and in the best acknowledged ways to address such pressing and large-
scale issues, policy makers of each field have worked in relative isolation so far.
Development experts often pay little attention to disaster-related issues or minimise their
importance in comparison to other economic and social priorities. The root causes of
vulnerability in the face of climate-related and other natural hazards are yet intimately
embedded in developmental failure for those who suffer from disasters. In return, these
disasters leave a heavy toll on development (Lewis, 1999; Wisner et al., 2004).
In parallel, climate and climate change specialists usually overlook disaster risk
reduction and consider it to be a subfield of secondary importance. Most of the current
discussions, including those at the UN (United Nations Development Group, 2009),
suggest the integration of disaster risk reduction into climate change adaptation rather than
into development policies, whereas both should be addressing underlying factors of risk
(see also Mercer, 2010). Even conflict and displacement topics are being reinterpreted to
suit the needs of climate change specialists (for a critique of the terms ‘climate conflict’ and
‘climate refugees’, see Hartmann, 2010). Framing disaster risk reduction within climate
change adaptation takes us backward rather than forward (Kelman and Gaillard, 2008). On

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the other hand, disaster risk reduction policies are still often enclosed around the rare and
extreme dimension of climate-related and other natural hazards, considering disasters as
events out of the regular developmental context. Planning to reduce disaster risks in that
way means merely treating symptoms while bypassing the root sources of harm.
The gap is wide. Closing it will require huge efforts from all those involved, and will
definitely require much more than the metaphorical use of concepts such as vulnerability,
capacity and resilience. It will entail a strong commitment of everyone to work together,
meaning better science that better serves policy needs alongside better policies developed
from science. As of now, many development, climate change and disaster risk reduction
practitioners often dismiss the value of scientific knowledge as being too far removed from
the daily reality of their work. At the same time, many scientists consider themselves to be
experts who should not engage in practice. A huge effort is thus needed to open dialogue,
and to build trust, amongst the large array of people and organisations who should be
involved in the implementation of both top-down and bottom-up actions. That includes
local communities, local governments, national governments, NGOs, international
institutions and scientists. Such dialogue would be possible only if the ground for
discussion is open, so that there are available tools and methodologies enabling everyone to
share their knowledge and expertise (e.g. Gaillard and Maceda, 2009).
Addressing vulnerability, capacity and resilience within the context of climate, disasters
and development requires a strong political will to tie all these issues together.
Contemporary good practices such as those observed in the Philippines and Colombia tend
to be isolated initiatives without always recognising that each place and each group
involved has faced and solved similar problems, a process that could have been facilitated
by knowing about the other’s work. To scale them up worldwide, national governments and
international organisations will have to commit to make them priorities for development
policy to transfer and adjust lessons for each local context.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author thanks Ilan Kelman for his invaluable support and two anonymous reviewers for
their advice which were of great help in improving the paper.

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