The global standardization of regional disaster risk management

Abstract

Natural disasters have become a heightened security issue in the last decade. Mitigating and responding to disasters, such as the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia and the 2011 earthquake in Japan, reflect a new security agenda that has spread across the globe and infiltrated most regional organizations. At first glance, the creation of regional programmes on disaster risk management (DRM) appears to be driven by the functional preferences of states. However, a comparison of ten regional organizations reveals some curious ambiguities. Despite different threat perceptions, financial budgets and geographical environments of regional organizations, a majority of states have formed DRM programmes that exhibit highly standardized features in terms of language, the referent points of protection and the apparent motivations for cooperation. World society theory is used to explain these striking similarities with reference to the global cultural system. This article also illustrates the analytical purchase of world society theory in understanding cooperation through regional organizations.

Notes

¹ To be sure, global estimated damages caused by natural disasters have risen from approximately US$195 billion in the 1970s to US$896.1 billion in the 2000s (EM-DAT 2011b). If these general figures are broken down according to each regional organization and adjusted for inflation the actual costs have not been substantial, ranging in most cases from a 1 to 4 per cent increase (see Table 1).

² I thank an anonymous reviewer for emphasizing this point.

³ The regional organizations were chosen based on their different political systems and cultures, while controlling for their date of establishment: all regional organizations—including their predecessors—are established organizations with a history of more than 20 years.

⁴ The apparent source of the standardized goals come from the UN Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA) and the source for the standardized terminology comes from a UNISDR publication on key DRM terms in 2004 that has since been updated in 2009 (UN 2005; UNISDR 2004; UNISDR 2009).

⁵ While ASEAN and the EU do not have an explicit reference to women's rights in their DRM agreements, they are expressed elsewhere, such as the ASEAN Commission on the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Women and Children (ACWC), which contain specific measures for ‘women in natural disasters’ (ASEAN 2011); and through EU Treaties and legislation (Council 2007b) and the European Court (Cichowski 2005).

⁶ To be sure, choosing this theory does not mean that the abovementioned theories cannot be used; rather world society theory is chosen because it is seen as the most applicable theory that will provide the most explanatory perchance for the particular question at hand.

⁷ Rationalization is a central term used in world society theory that is defined as ‘the structuring of everyday life within standardized impersonal rules that constitute social organization as a means to collective purpose’ (Meyer et al 2009, 76).

⁸ World society theory shares some similarities to the English School's notion of ‘world society’ based on universal (liberal) cosmopolitanism (Buzan 2001, 475–476) and shares fewer similarities with world system theory and state competition theory, which do not locate any ‘causal significance’ in culture (Meyer et al 1997, 147).

⁹ A DRM model is defined as a standardized ‘set of cultural rules’ in regional programmes that ‘give generalized meaning to social activity and regulate it in a patterned way’ (Meyer et al 2009, 85).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Simon Hollis

Simon Hollis is a postdoctoral researcher at the Swedish National Defence College. He obtained his PhD in 2012 from the Hertie School of Government in Berlin. His postdoctoral research examines the influence international organizations have on local disaster risk management in the Caribbean and the South Pacific. Email: [email protected]