La Pintana

Disasters began to be prominently viewed through a vulnerability lens in the 1970s and 1980s in response to critiques of the dominant natural hazard or risk-hazard, impact-reduction approach (Hilhorst and Bankoff, 2004). This brings consideration of disasters away from hazards themselves and towards structural constraints (social, cultural, economic and political) inherent in the ‘normal’

functioning of society (Hewitt, 1983; Watts and Bohle, 1993, Bohle et al., 1994;

Cutter, 1996; Pelling, 2003a; Wisner et al., 2004). The central tenet is that disasters highlight the constraints and problems present in everyday life;

“disasters are perceived as extensions of the problems confronted in ‘normal’ or

‘daily’ life (Wisner, 2004: 186). Thus, disasters are considered to be within the regular social fabric of life rather than outside it – ‘exceptional events’ – as in the natural hazards paradigm (Wisner, 2004; Gaillard, 2010).

This paradigm was pioneered by O’Keefe et al., (1976) who ‘took the naturalness out of natural disasters’ in a seminal article in Nature (vol. 260), arguing that

“disasters are more a consequence of socio-economic than natural factors”

(O’Keefe et al., 1976: 556). Also frequently referenced in the literature as highly influential are chapters in Hewitt (1983), and more recently Blaikie et al., (1994), revised as Wisner et al. (2004). All approach vulnerability to disaster as a condition existing independently of hazard; “disasters are essentially social happenings” (Allen, 2003: 174). This type of approach is often referred to as

‘structuralist’ as opposed to ‘behaviouralist’ (Liverman, 1990; Susman et al., 1983; Turner and Robbins, 2008). Structuralists interpret the chain of disaster

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causality as running from social to biophysical factors, focussing on the distal roots of local problems rather than interpreting social causality as behaviour linked to specific hazards (Hewitt, 1983a). As stated by Cutter (1996: 533):

This perspective highlights the social construction of vulnerability, a condition rooted in historical, cultural, social and economic processes.

Vulnerability reflects marginalisation in daily life (Wisner et al., 2004).

The disaster explanation frameworks developed by Wisner et al. (2004) are widely cited as influential to a social conceptual framework of vulnerability in the disasters and climate change field (e.g. Cutter, 1996; Twigg, 1998; Cutter, 2003;

Adger and Kelly, 1999; Kelly and Adger, 2000; Allen, 2003; Few, 2003). Wisner et al.(2004) explicitly separate, social and physical elements of hazard in order to emphasise social causation, defining 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 (an extreme natural event or process) (Wisner et al., 2004: 11).

Their focus is on the social causation of disasters as:

… the product of social, political, and economic environments (as explicitly distinct from the natural environment), because of the way these ultimately structure the lives of different groups of people (Wisner et al., 2004: 4).

This is exemplified in their ‘Pressure and Release Model’ (PAR) (Figure 6) built upon in the ‘Access Model’, explaining the causal chain of disaster as contingent on social structures.

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Figure 6 Pressure and Release (PAR) Model: the progression of vulnerability, after Wisner et al. (2004: 51)

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Wisner et al. (2004) propose that vulnerability has

… three sets of links that connect the disaster to processes that are located at decreasing levels of specificity from the people impacted upon by the disaster (Wisner et al., 2004: 52).

As specified by Smit and Wandel (2006), in the context of climate change, vulnerability is a ‘nested hierarchy’ with local scale determinants linked to higher scale processes. The most distant of these are ‘root causes’, or widespread economic, social, cultural and political processes – including ideologies – affecting the allocation and distribution of resources and power among different groups of people. Root causes translate into more specific ‘dynamic pressures’

such as population changes, urbanization and conflict, as well as export promotion and natural resource extraction activities. These dynamic pressures, although not necessarily negative or ‘vulnerability-inducing’ in themselves, can generate locally specific ‘unsafe conditions’ for some social groups. Unsafe conditions are the specific consequences of dynamic pressures when a particular physical hazard occurs, and are manifest in temporally and spatially specific access to resources by various social groups such as children, women, or particular ethnic groups. Vulnerability is separate from physical hazard in the PAR model, however, disaster occurs when social vulnerability intersects with a physical hazard, or ‘trigger event’. The vulnerability of a human system to disaster is the place and time-specific manifestation of wider social, economic and political processes.

The vulnerability paradigm brings disasters within the realm of development – it is development failures, not hazards, which create disasters (Cuny, 1983; Hewitt, 1983a,b; Watts, 1983; Anderson and Woodrow, 1989). Rather than reflecting

‘natural stimuli’ or human behaviour and perceptions in relation to these, disasters reflect development failure; the root causes of vulnerability are the same as the root causes of other development-related problems. Thus, the vulnerability perspective and the placement of disasters within development

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processes, is well established in the disasters field. Consequently, the theoretical principals are infiltrating (to a degree) international policy such as the UNISDR (2005). Although approaches to disaster risk reduction incorporating the key tenets of this paradigm are established in practice – in particular, community-based disaster risk reduction (CBDRR) – much of this still reflects a natural hazard paradigm with technocratic measures dominant (Heijmans, 2009; Gaillard, 2010).

Heijmans (2009) notes a separation between rhetoric and practice in this regard as although many organisations involved in CBDRR espouse vulnerability reduction in their policies, initiatives in practice tend to be ‘depoliticised’.

Entitlements

The theory of entitlements developed by Sen (1981) in the context of poverty and famines is central to much social vulnerability research across disciplines (Janssen et al., 2006; Olmos, 2001; Adger, 2006). Entitlements theory marked an important turning point in considerations of the causal structure of famine (Downing, 2003). Instead of considering famine and food insecurity as a product of predominantly drought and crop failure, Sen (1981) framed famine as a result of ‘entitlement failure’. Entitlement failure is the inability to mobilize the economic and social resources necessary to access food and cope with adverse conditions such as drought and crop failure. Famine therefore, is a result of both the demand for food and the social and economic ways in which food is obtained (Adger, 2006). This emphasizes both the availability of ‘entitlements’ or resources and the ability of individuals to call on these resources in constructions of vulnerability to food insecurity and famine. Importantly, this highlights the fact that local-scale vulnerability is contributed to by processes such as market forces and policy trends that have broad-scale resonance and origins, and are outside the direct control of individuals, households and communities.

The concept of entitlements is further developed and applied in the context of vulnerability to climate change by, notably, Watts and Bohle (1993), Bohle et al., (1994) and Adger and Kelly (1999). As stated by Adger and Kelly (1999):

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The social differentiation of entitlements are not constrained in their analysis to those institutions of the state but extend more widely to include both formal political structures…and social and cultural norms (Adger and Kelly, 1999: 257).

This is recognized as ‘expanded entitlements’ by Dreze and Sen (1989).

Importantly, this recognizes the constraints placed on access to resources by endogenous as well as exogenous social structures. Entitlements are determined by an individual’s position or place of power in an internal as well as external social hierarchy (Liverman, 1990).

According to Bohle et al. (1994), the concept of entitlements includes cultural and intra-familial entitlements to resources as well as encompassing wider structures of empowerment by which these entitlements are secured and contested. Entitlements therefore, extend beyond material and economic measures of well-being to encompass the multitude ways in which resources necessary for well-being are accessed, distributed, and contested over space and time (Kelly and Adger, 2000). Access to entitlements denotes the options that individuals, households, communities and social groups have available to them to minimize the negative impacts of climate change and take advantage of the opportunities.

Sustainable livelihoods and vulnerability to poverty

Many approaches to vulnerability in the hazards field, in particular, draw on conceptualisations of vulnerability within the sustainable livelihoods and poverty field. This field contributes, among other things, an explicit focus on local livelihoods and the ways in which livelihood choices and options are enabled and constrained by wider processes. The Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA) originally developed by Chambers and Conway (1992) is a framework for understanding vulnerability to poverty. However, this has been applied in many contexts, and is often cited as influential to framings of social vulnerability in the hazards field (Birkmann, 2006; Few, 2003) and climate change context (Hamill et

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al., 2005; Downing, 2003; Reid and Vogel, 2006; Klein et al., 2007). A commonly accepted definition of livelihood is given by Chambers and Conway (1992: 7): “a livelihood comprises the capabilities, assets (stores, resources, claims and access) and activities required for a means of living”. The SLA is aimed at identifying ways in which (mainly) rural livelihoods are vulnerable to external stresses and shocks – natural or otherwise (Adger, 2006; Hamill et al., 2005; Downing, 2003;

Birkmann, 2006; Yamin et al., 2004). The focus is mainly at the local scale.

In line with much of the disasters literature, the sustainable livelihoods and poverty literature emphasise the nature of daily existence as shaping vulnerability to environmental stress. Wisner (2004: 190) contends that situations creating vulnerability are “rooted in the routines, opportunities and limitations of ‘normal’ or ‘daily’ life”. Lavell (2004) terms this ‘everyday vulnerability’ or ‘lifestyle vulnerability’: “vulnerability to disasters and lifestyle vulnerability are part of the same package” (Lavell, 2004: 72).

Throughout entitlements, natural hazards and disasters, and sustainable livelihood based approaches, an either explicit or implicit assumption is that poverty and vulnerability to environmental stress are in some way equated.

While biophysical interpretations emphasise exposure to physical hazard, social interpretations emphasise factors such as marginalization, inequality, food entitlements and access to resources – factors generally associated with or caused by poverty. Although this depends on the definition of poverty itself (Hamill et al., 2005; Bohle et al., 1994), suffice to say poverty can be correlated with vulnerability because of its direct association with access to resources (Adger, 1999; Wisner et al., 2004). Poverty is sometimes addressed as a cause of vulnerability (e.g. O’Brien et. al, 2004). Conversely, vulnerability is also conceptualized as the cause of poverty – as the factors that generate and maintain a condition of poverty (e.g. Yamin et al., 2004). Vulnerability to environmental stress itself can act to exacerbate poverty in a self-perpetuating cycle (Yamin et al., 2004, Delica-Willison and Willison, 2004). However, it is

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generally accepted that poor people are likely to be more exposed to physical hazard and possess less adaptive capacity to respond to it, because they have fewer choices about where and how to make a living. Few (2003) identifies that the poor are more likely to occupy an environment where the consequences of flooding will be most severe, for example. Adger (1999) uses poverty as a proxy indicator of baseline individual and household vulnerability to climate extremes in coastal Vietnam. In this case study, poverty is directly linked to marginalization and lack of access to resources critical for resilient livelihoods in the face of climate extremes.

Most significantly a condition of poverty generally means fewer resources are available with which to cope with and recover from environmental stress. As Liverman (1990: 32) emphasizes: “the most vulnerable people may not be in the most vulnerable places – poor people can live in productive biophysical environments and be vulnerable, and wealthy people can live in fragile physical environments and live relatively well”. This highlights a major shortcoming of biophysical interpretations of vulnerability in that the “texture of vulnerability remains hidden” (Stephens, 2004: 100) in vulnerability indicators based on the most highly exposed physical and human systems, such as drought prone regions or low-lying coastal areas.

However, Few (2003), Pelling (2003b) and Yamin et al. (2004), caution against

“routinely equating vulnerability with poverty” (Few, 2003: 49), due to the highly complex mesh of factors creating social vulnerability. Blanket indicators of income-related poverty can conceal the highly differential nature of vulnerability at the local scale (Hamill, et al., 2005). Therefore, although it can generally be said that at a broad scale, poorer countries, regions or social units are more vulnerable than wealthier ones, those who are ‘poorest’ may not necessarily be the most vulnerable at the local scale (Bohle et al., 1994). Poor groups of people are more likely to have to accept greater vulnerability to minimise poverty on a daily basis (Pelling, 2003a). At the local scale, vulnerability is multi-dimensional,

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and dependent on a raft of factors such as the strength of social networks and institutions, gender issues and beliefs or customs (Bohle et al., 1994; Wisner, 2004; Allen, 2003; Cutter, 2003).