The spotty record of the Hyogo Framework for Action: Understanding the incentives of natural disaster politics and policy making

Abstract

Given the increasing prevalence of large-scale natural disasters, why has progress implementing the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA) been so varied and so spotty? This paper explores this question using an analytical framework developed in the economic and political science literature on collective action. As public goods vary across their levels of publicness and their aggregation technologies, so do many of the inherent incentives associated with countries fulfilling their pledges in the HFA. Thus, the framework helps explain why some of the HFA's priorities for action have been and will continue to be more easily attainable than others.

Notes

1 The full name of the document is Hyogo Framework for Action 2005–2015: Building the Resilience of Nations and Communities to Disasters. This paper follows the practice of the UN and international community and hereinafter refers to this convention as the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA, 2005).

2 The earthquake in Pakistan in October 2005 killed 73,338 people; the earthquake in China in May 2008 killed 84,476 people, the earthquake that resulted in the Indian Ocean tsunami in December 2004 killed 165,708 in Indonesia alone; and the earthquake in Haiti in January 2010 killed 222,570. All numbers taken from “EM-DAT: The International Disaster Database,” Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters—CRED, Université Catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium, available at http://www.emdat.be/.

3 Head (1962) and many others following refer to this as “jointness of supply.”

4 Sandler makes this point very succinctly: “Welfare loss arises when there is no cost associated with extending consumption rights to anyone who derives satisfaction from the good, even when this satisfaction is rather small” (Sandler, 2004, p. 18).

5 Although Olson is the first lengthy exposition and analysis of the problem associated with the provision of public goods, Samuelson (1954) precedes Olson as the first to systematically formalize the theory. In addition, all public goods analysis has as its foundation the scholarship of 18th century enlightenment, such as Hume's Treatise of Human Nature and Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Kaul et al., 1999, p. 3).

6 The definition of disaster continues to be the subject of much debate (Perry & Quarantelli, 2005; Quarantelli, 1998). My working definition avoids many of the ontological debates and follows Drabek: “an actual event, or the threat of an event, which disrupts the normal routines of a community in a significant way” (2010, pp. 27–28). The examples given throughout this paper focus exclusively on natural disasters (and particularly rapid-onset natural disasters) as opposed to technological disasters. See the International Disaster Database (Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), 2008) for the detailed classification scheme.

7 Even prior to compliance, the existence of the regulations provides its own public good of information to the community on appropriate standards for housing and other building construction. I thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this point.

8 The early thinking on public goods reveals some differences regarding the qualities of exclusion and rivalry. For example, Samuelson's work (1954, 1955) tends to assume perfect jointness of supply in public goods while Head's work (1962) defines these as independent but related qualities. By 1965, Olson had done some thinking about both and had read an early draft of Buchanan's “An Economic Theory of Clubs” (1965). The idea that different types of collective goods might have different prospects for cooperation underpins his distinction between “exclusive” and “inclusive” collective goods (Olson, 1965, pp. 14–15, fn. 21, 38, 58).

9 For an excellent discussion of the early warning system in Japan and elsewhere during the 2011 earthquake, see NOVA (2011).

10 Aside from this example, it is important to note that a higher absolute contribution to a public good does not automatically imply a higher marginal impact. I thank an anonymous reviewer for this point.

11 Many thanks to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this notion of discreteness.

12 Many of the key documents and records of the proceedings of the WCDR are available on the conference's website at http://www.unisdr.org/2005/wcdr/wcdr-index.htm.

13 As a practical matter, CIs that can be placed into multiple categories have been split in Table 6 into “a” and “b” and labeled as such.