Mapping Vulnerability: Disasters, Development and People

by Greg Bankoff, Greg Bankoff (Editor), Dorothea Hilhorst (Editor)

Raging floods, massive storms and cataclysmic every year up to 340 million people are affected by these and other disasters, which cause loss of life and damage to personal property, agriculture, and infrastructure. So what can be done? The key to understanding the causes of disasters and mitigating their impacts is the concept of 'vulnerability'. Mapping Vulnerability analyses 'vulnerability' as a concept central to the way we understand disasters and their magnitude and impact. Written and edited by a distinguished group of disaster scholars and practitioners, this book is a counterbalance to those technocratic approaches that limit themselves to simply looking at disasters as natural phenomena. Through the notion of vulnerability, the authors stress the importance of social processes and human-environmental interactions as causal agents in the making of disasters. They critically examine what renders communities unsafe - a condition, they argue, that depends primarily on the relative position of advantage or disadvantage that a particular group occupies within a society's social order. The book also looks at vulnerability in terms of its relationship to development and its impact on policy and people's lives, through consideration of selected case studies drawn from Africa, Asia and Latin America. Mapping Vulnerability is essential reading for academics, students, policymakers and practitioners in disaster studies, geography, development studies, economics, environmental studies and sociology.

256 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2003

About the author

I am a non-western historian with interests in the role of disasters in human societies, resources and risk management, the environmental consequences of modern conflict, human-animal relations, and the development of colonial science. Though my particular geographical focus is on Southeast Asia and on the maritime nature of Spain’s empire in the Pacific, I have increasingly become more of a global historian in recent years.
Thinking like an environmental historian means considering not simply what happened between peoples in the past but also about how different peoples related to the inanimate and animate world around them: the earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, typhoons, floods and droughts that regularly affected communities; the buildings, forts, ships, roads, fields and forests, what they were made of and how they were used; and the livestock, game and pets that men and women worked alongside, hunted and shared their homes with. In my work, I always try to adopt an inter-disciplinary approach that combines the social with the natural sciences, theoretical insights with historical perspectives. I find that it is working at the intersections of these enquiries that produce the most exciting research.

In particular, disasters are set to become a major new field of historical studies, receiving increasing popular and governmental attention that corresponds to their escalating magnitude and frequency. One only has to think of the impact and concern that events like the recent Indian Ocean Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina engendered to appreciate this point fully. Yet little work of an historical nature has so far been done in this area both in assessing the true extent of past events and their consequences but equally, and perhaps more importantly, in determining what role they have played in the development of human societies over time