Concepto de mediación comunitaria

Political ecology has formed a conceptual foundation for studying disasters since the 1980s (Comfort et al., 1999; Hewitt, 1983; Pelling, 1999; Wisner et al., 2004). Prior to this time disasters were understood as extremes in geophysical activity requiring what Hewitt (1983) referred to as ‘technocratic interventions’. These technocratic approaches to disaster management focus on the technical tasks of monitoring, warning and detection, or engineering efforts (such as the construction of flood canals), while overlooking the social vulnerabilities that worsen disaster impact (Hewitt, 1983). While the ‘paradigm shift’ of disaster research began to emerge during the 1970s with the works of Kates (1971), Burton et al. (1978) and White (1974), it gained considerable momentum following the early political ecology works of the 1980-90s (Hewitt, 1983; Blaikie et al., 1994). From this time onwards, scholars have argued that disasters are the combination of a physical hazard event with the social, political and economic factors that create conditions of vulnerability (Susman et al., 1983), a definition that still broadly applies today. Disaster risk is still widely recognised as a function of a hazard with underlying societal vulnerabilities,

most commonly conceptualised by Wisner et al.’s (2004) pseudo-equation:

Risk = Vulnerability x Hazard

Vulnerability studies occupy a prominent position in disaster scholarship and these are heavily guided by the theoretical foundations first described in Blaikie et al. (1994), later republished as Wisner et al.’s (2004), work ‘At Risk’. Wisner et al. (2004) define vulnerability as ‘the characteristics of a person or group and their situation that influence their capacity to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the impact of a natural hazard’ (p. 11). This vulnerability framework considers the factors that place someone’s life and livelihood at risk and is influenced by social markers such as gender, class, age and ethnicity (Cannon, 1994; Wisner et al., 2004). A more recent definition of vulnerability is provided in the UNISDR 2015 Sendai Framework for Action as: ‘The conditions determined by physical, social, economic and environmental factors or processes, which increase the susceptibility of a community to the impacts of hazards’ (p. 10) (UNISDR, 2015). While both definitions link vulnerability to the wider processes that influence the degree of harm or susceptibility an individual or group experiences due to a hazard event, the UNISDR approach is constrained by its omission of the political drivers of vulnerability.

To capture the processes involved in the construction of vulnerability, Wisner et al. (2004) present the access to resources framework as: ‘the way unsafe conditions arise in relation to the economic and political processes that allocate assets, income and other resources within a society’ (p. 92). This framework recognises that disasters are not static over time and that impacts are typically differentially experienced between households based on underlying conditions of vulnerability. The approach presented in Wisner et al. (2004) has its theoretical foundations in the earlier political ecology works of Blaikie (1985) and Blaikie and Brookfield (1987) wherein the soil degradation problem of Nepal was explained in terms of a multi-scaled political contestation over natural resources. These works rely on ‘chains of explanation’ (Blaikie, 1985) or a process of ‘progressive contextualisation’

(Vayda, 1983) to explain the construction of environmental risks and vulnerability. Wisner et al.’s (2004) access framework is also rooted in Sen’s (1983) entitlement theory and related to Watts and Bohle (1993), Bohle et al. (1994) and Adgar and Kelly’s (1999) conceptualisation of vulnerability as a multi-dimensional space wherein the poor are more likely to suffer the impacts of harmful disturbances (such as famine or natural hazards). The access theory is now widely applied within the disaster literature to describe the unequal impacts of disasters across many geographical settings and hazard types as discussed below.

Within the disaster literature, the theory of access considers the broad range of resources needed to adequately prepare for, and overcome, the impact of disasters. These may include, but are not limited to, land relations, livelihood opportunities, economic reserves, disaster knowledge and political representation. For example, studies conducted in coastal Bangladesh and the Philippines, reveal that access to land is constrained by political marginalisation and population growth, which has forced the poorest people into the most hazardous locations (Dove and Khan, 1995; Gaillard et al., 2007). This pattern was also observed during the impact of the 1976 Guatemala earthquake and 1974 Honduras hurricane Fifi, wherein marginalisation and underdevelopment forced peasants to build poorly constructed homes in vulnerable locations (such as steep slopes adjoining rivers) (Susman et al. 1983). These pre-existing inequalities leave fewer resources to adapt to hazardous events (see Winchester’s 2000 study of flood impacts in India) and can hamper relief efforts (as occurred following the 1994 California earthquake described in Bolin and Standford 1999). Alongside access to land and livelihoods, vulnerability is also exacerbated by a lack of access to, and sharing of, specialist scientific knowledge (see Degg and Homan 2006 on earthquake hazard in Egypt). Furthermore, access to resources varies within a society and factors such as ‘race’, class, gender and ethnicity all influence vulnerability and disaster impact (Bolin, 2007; Wisner et al., 2004).

Importantly, vulnerability is also understood as the product of cumulative decisions made over an historical time frame (Comfort et al., 1999). For example, the devastation caused by Hurricane Mitch in 1998 in Nicaragua and Honduras is related to existing vulnerabilities caused by the clearance of old growth forest for coffee and banana plantations as well as the austerity measures enforced by international financial institutions that contributed to a lack of local government capacity (Comfort et al., 1999). Oliver-Smith’s (1999) study of the 1970 Peru earthquake further extends this historical causal chain of analysis, arguing that the devastation was caused by Peru’s severe state of underdevelopment, which began with the colonisation of Peru and its sudden insertion as a colony into the world’s economic system. Traditional Peruvian adaptation measures such as the construction of earthquake resistant buildings and spreading of agricultural resources over a wide area were replaced with the construction of dense towns with narrow streets that were subsequently highly vulnerable to floods, earthquakes and volcanic activity. Likewise, Pelling (1999) relates vulnerability to flood hazard in urban Guyana to historical colonial programs that cleared and developed mangrove swamps.

The studies outlined above demonstrate how the structural factors of marginalisation, ethnicity, inequitable distribution of land, and population pressure have constrained certain groups to occupy hazardous locations while leaving them fewer resources to relocate, withstand and recover from hazardous events. While there are many more studies that describe the structural causation of vulnerability, the literature cited above suffices to demonstrate the often deeply historical relationships between access to resources, as defined by social, economic, environmental and political processes, and conditions of vulnerability.