The role of the Sovereign state in 21^st century environmental disasters

ABSTRACT

2019 was the second hottest year on record, with enhanced ice melts, sea level rises, heatwaves, droughts, and unprecedented large-scale wildfires of record intensity. Here I chart a new research agenda for understanding the interconnections between human behaviour, environmental disasters, and governing a more disaster-prone world. I argue that sovereign states’ technological responses to environmental disasters as risks to be reduced systemically ignores human contributions to environmental hazards and vulnerabilities. Using a constructivist analysis, I analyse states’ understandings of, and capacity to respond to, cascading environmental disasters at multiple scales according to what they collectively see, what they know, and how they act in terms of emergency preparedness and planning. Revealing the inadequacies of sovereign states’ understanding of what constitutes environmental disasters absent their role in them, brings us closer to better governing cascading environmental disasters in the 21^st Century.

KEYWORDS:

• Environment
• disaster
• climate change
• governance
• politics
• state sovereignty
• constructivism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Sovereign states of all political and economic regime types and levels of development (democratic, authoritarian, liberal/neoliberal/welfare capitalist, communist, developed and developing) contribute to, and must address, environmental disasters. For this reason, the capacity and policy autonomy of specific types of states to respond to environmental disasters is not detailed here, although various institutionalist approaches in political science have been usefully applied (e.g. Lin 2015, Valdivieso and Andersson 2017).

2. A constructivist approach differs from the main international relations theories, that either argue that states have too little power to effect change in the international system (neorealism and neoliberal institutionalism) or that states can effect change on behalf of domestic social forces (liberal internationalism, Marxist, poststructuralist, and neo-Gramscian approaches). See Hobson (2002) and Carroll et al. (2020). Constructivism looks at how states constitute the international system, and through their collective understanding and actions, can change it (Wendt 1992).

3. The International Disaster Database distinguishes natural disasters by class: geophysical, meteorological, hydrological, climatological, biological, and extra-terrestrial, compared with (human made) technological disasters: industrial, transport, and miscellaneous. A disaster must meet the following criteria to be entered into the database: ‘Ten or more people reported killed; 100 or more people reported affected; Declaration of a State of Emergency; Call for international assistance’ (EM-DAT 2020).

4. Vulnerability is defined as the ‘state of susceptibility to harm from exposure to stresses associated with environmental and social change and from the absence of capacity to adapt’ (Adger 2006). The literature differs on the relationship between vulnerability and exposure to a hazard (Cutter et al. 2008, p. 600).

5. This is a result of better reporting of assets (UNDRR 2019, p. 269), economic and population growth, and building expansion (Ritchie 2014).

6. This is embodied, for example, in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, which launched in 2012.

7. Resilience is defined as the ‘ability of a social system to respond and recover from disasters and includes those inherent conditions that allow the system to absorb impacts and cope with an event, as well as post-event, adaptive processes that facilitate the ability of the social system to re-organize, change, and learn in response to a threat’ (Folke 2006, Cutter et al. 2008, p. 599).

8. See also Meadowcroft (2005) and Heinrichs and Laws (2014).

9. A range of international financial services have been identified as necessary to finance environmental disaster risk reduction (see UNDRR 2019).

10. Scholars also highlight a different response is needed to protect critical infrastructure from environmental disasters (Feng and Xiang-Yang 2018).

11. States’ reliance on artificial intelligence and networked information may also provide another vulnerability point in responding to environmental disasters (UNDRR 2019).

12. Although there is recognition of traditional indigenous knowledge in the UNDRR report (2019).