Can positional concerns be a threat to disaster management? Assessing the prevalence of positional concerns among socially vulnerable populations in Trinidad & Tobago

ABSTRACT

Social vulnerability refers to the inability of some populations, organisations and societies to withstand adverse impacts from multiple stressors to which they are exposed, such as natural hazards. In this paper, we examine the existence of positional concerns (i.e. willingness to incur a loss so as to be above or not to be below others) in social vulnerability that may undermine the strategies and policies aiming at fostering the resilience of socially vulnerable populations. We found that the majority of people express egalitarian preferences, namely, they reject Pareto efficient allocations or gain improvements that benefit more to others than to them because they dislike inequalities. Our results showed that positional concerns are more often expressed than absolute concerns and suggest that policy makers, when tackling the problem of social vulnerability, should take into account citizens’ preferences. We suggest solutions to cope with the problem of positional concerns.

KEYWORDS:

• Social vulnerability
• envy
• status
• policy recommendation

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 A Pareto efficient policy represents a policy that improves the situation of some agents without deteriorating the situation of other agents (see infra).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

J. Celse

Jérémy Celse, PhD, is an associate professor at ESSCA School of Management. He is passionate about understanding human behaviour. His research interests include attitudes, unethical behaviours, emotions, and behaviour change.

M. Kensen

Matthew Kensen, is a PhD student at The Pacific Centre for Environment and Sustainable Development (PaCE-SD) at The University of the South Pacific’s Laucala campus in Suva, Fiji Islands. He is currently undertaking research on human unethical behaviour in climate change and natural disasters.