Resilient- Society ‘for’ Sustainable Development? -Deconstructing the ‘problem representation’ within Disaster Management Policies in India.
Abstract as pdf
Corresponding Author:
Kaniska Singh
Centre for Policy Studies, Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai India
194463004@iitb.ac.in
Author(s):
Introduction of Disaster Management (DM) Act, 2005 and National Policy for Disaster Management (NPDM), 2005, marked a paradigm shift in the disaster policy thinking of the Indian government from a highly sporadic and stand-alone to a proactive disaster risk reduction perspective (NPDM,2005; NPDM 2009). The paper attempts to uncover the ‘problem representation(s)’ within the DM policy documents through the ‘What’s the problem represented to be’(WPR) approach by Bacchi(2009). These representations affect the policy responses by limiting the scope of the policy to specific directions in which problems are defined. The paper also analyses the epistemologies and disaster paradigm behind these problem representations, within which the policy answers are imagined. The paper's findings suggest that the conceptualization of disaster assumed by the Indian DM policy documents is influenced by the intellectual underpinnings of the dominant ‘hazard’ paradigm (Hewitt, 1983) and advocates policy solutions that overemphasize the role of hazard triggers. It further argues that the Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and ‘Resilient-society’ as policy goals are also increasingly subsumed under the ‘larger’ ambit of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) within the recent National Disaster Management Plan (NDMP), 2019. Moreover, the dominance of the ‘reactive’ resilience framework in the policy text is also matched with an under-emphasis on ‘social vulnerability,’ which elides the role of socio-economic processes shaping vulnerabilities. The paper finally argues that the dominance of SDGs and resilience framework coupled with the ‘problem representation’ within DM policies effectively depoliticize the central role of processes like globalization, colonialism, development, and other socio-economic processes in the creation of ‘disaster risk,’ and therefore offer depoliticized and technocratic solutions which are ‘hazard-centric.’
Towards what futures? The political dimensions of sustainable development and resilience