Introduction to the “risky everyday”

Citation

van Voorst, R., Wisner, B., Hellman, J. and Nooteboom, G. (2015), "Introduction to the “risky everyday”", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 24 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/DPM-04-2015-0077

Introduction to the “risky everyday”

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Disaster Prevention and Management, Volume 24, Issue 4.

In an age when exposure and vulnerability to hazard has increased dramatically (Lopez-Caressi et al., 2014, Wisner et al., 2004; World Bank, 2011), risk and disaster studies have gained momentum and established themselves as separate fields of study. Nevertheless, the focus of “risk studies” remains corporate and environmental; whilst “disaster studies” remain centred on large-scale disasters, for examples those triggered by natural hazards (Wisner and Gaillard, 2009). As a consequence, the study of everyday hazards, and most specifically the ways in which human actors cope with or endure these stresses and shocks of “daily life” (Wisner, 1993), remains less common among scholars. It has been argued, though, that these everyday risks endanger many more people around the world in aggregate and cause large losses when totalled up (GNDR, 2013; UNISDR, 2009, 2013, 2015).

Examples of everyday risk and endurance include the situations of people facing slow onset and pervasive hazards such as drought and coastal erosion; or people living in flood-prone urban slums, in polluted areas or close to dangerous industries, on the slopes of active volcanoes, in river deltas, in coastal plains, herders in rangelands that are conflict zones and those who make their living in hazardous locations (e.g. lorry and bus drivers, newspaper sellers, informal cooks and food sellers on the pavement and children who beg in heavy traffic). Many of these “everyday risks” are enforced upon people due to their economic and political marginalisation; others are to some extent deliberately taken by people themselves (Nooteboom, 2014, pp. 20-21, 171).

This special issue is a contribution to a slowly but gradually increasing body of literature that pays attention for the topic of “everyday risk”. The risky every day is an important topic, because it has been underemphasized in studies of risk, while the lives of millions of people are affected by it. More attention for such suffering was called for in 2009, when a theme issue on “neglected disasters” was published in Jámbà, the journal of the African Centre for Disaster Studies, University of the Northwest, South Africa. The editors questioned why some human suffering and social disruption receive attention from authorities, donors, researchers and the media, while some do not (Wisner and Gaillard, 2009).

In its Global Assessment of Disaster Reduction 2009, the UNISDR also began to acknowledge and bring into the mainstream a limited appreciation of “the risky everyday” by distinguishing between “intensive” and “extensive” risk. The former refers to the chance of being affected by a large scale, energy intensive disaster of the sort currently catalogued in the EM-DAT database: those that kill more than ten people and cause losses of more than one million US dollars. By contrast, “extensive” risk refers to the probability of loss, damage or injury from a small event that is invisible to the international and usually even national statistical systems. These small landslides, floods, storms, hail storms and lightning strikes, residential and wild fires, animal attacks, crop failures in aggregate have been shown to account for a large proportion of national infrastructural loss and, above all, act to “trap” the poor and working poor in situations of risk and poverty due to the loss of assets and costs of recovery (UNISDR, 2009).

The Global Network of Civil Society Organisations for Disaster Reduction (GNDR) has further probed such everyday hazard in its 2013 large-scale survey (GNDR, 2013). More than 21,000 people in 57 countries were asked about the threats they face in everyday life. These data added to the growing demand – voiced from many quarters at the UNISDR’s Global Platform conference in May 2013 – for a “post 2015” international risk reduction regime that would go beyond large scale geo-hazards and climate related hazards to include pollution, occupational health and safety, crime, corruption and violence. GNDR has subsequently carried out more than 6,000 interviews in South and Central America, piloting the use of protocol that asks people in conversation what threats they face, what impacts from them, what measures they have tried to reduce these threats and, finally, what obstacles they encountered. This on-going policy and practice focused research programme is called Frontline. More than half of all the “threats” mentioned in the 6,000 conversations were non-natural, that is, social (e.g. crime), economic (e.g. price instability) or technological/environmental (e.g. pollution).

However, promising these first efforts towards an improvement of the institutional appreciation of “everyday risks”, what still lacks is an in-depth scientific understanding of the local interpretations of the risky everyday. There is not much academic literature in any of the social sciences, economics or political sciences that comprehensively discusses risk from the point of view of people’s experiences. Disaster studies instead deal with external aspects of disasters, such as risk assessment and the policies of disaster intervention, mitigation and prevention. Lupton (1999, p. 1) writes of the still dominant techno-scientific perspective towards risk that is expressed in the natural sciences, engineering, economics, medicine and psychology. In these studies, risk is largely treated as an objective phenomenon that can be calculated with the use of statistical formulae based on probability of hazard events and the magnitude of the consequences. The aim of the techno-scientific perspective is the identification of hazards, tracing out their causal factors, building predictive models of people’s responses to various types of hazard and proposing interventions that may help to decrease the impact of hazards (Van Voorst, 2014, pp. 20-21). In this literature, a consistent study of the risk-perceptions and experiences of local residents is often lacking (McLaughlin and Dietz, 2008; Bankoff et al., 2004; Heijmans, 2001; IFRC, 2015).

In this special journal issue, we take a perspective “from below” and focus on people’s experiences of risk and disasters, as well as on people’s interpretations of risk. Key questions to the contributors are: how do people themselves view the risks that they face and/or take in their everyday lives? How do they interpret and live with risks? How do people’s perceptions and interpretations conflict or correspond to those of government officials and scientific advisors? In the end, what are the risk behaviour outcomes? Such questions crucially need to be raised in studies of the “risky everyday”.

Climate changes, environmental degradation, urbanization and increasing economic and political inequality all have added new categories of vulnerable people and fragile livelihoods to the lexicon of disaster risk and natural hazard (Wisner and Gaillard, 2009; Wisner et al., 2004). Although western social sciences typically depict intensive risk-events as abnormal occurrences, Bankoff has pointed out that some local communities and individuals have come to accept hazard and disaster as a frequent life experience. This certainly also counts for smaller, more structural types of “everyday risk” as the ones described above. For communities that are used to living with the unpredictable, such threats should not be perceived as abnormal occurrences – as they are still too often when depicted through the epistemological lens of western social sciences – but as normal everyday events (Bankoff, 2006): ordinary people engage in a “normalization of threat” (Bankoff, 2004, pp. 102, 109).

Natural events that seem straightforward, such as floods or volcanic eruptions, may be made complex and more damaging because of conflict situations and extreme polarity between rich and poor. This intellectual complexity and inclusiveness is mirrored in an emerging policy consensus that poverty reduction, climate change adaptation and risk reduction have to be pursued as a comprehensive whole. But such a comprehensive approach to development and disaster implies that previously and currently neglected forms of everyday risk, uncertainty and coping must be taken into account.

This special theme issue intends to contribute to a better academic understanding of the ways in which people in Southeast Asia interpret, experience and cope with everyday risk. In each of the articles, specific attention is paid to the oft-overlooked riskiness that is inherent to many people’s daily lives, as well as to emic (inside) interpretations of risk (IFRC, 2015). Two common themes are touched upon: “the everyday” and “risk and uncertainty”. Viewing the lives of urban and rural dwellers through these lenses offers the potential of deepening theoretical as well as practical insights into everyday endurance of extreme situations. Most papers in this collection begin with the idea that people who live with daily risks perceive these as a part of daily life. If we consider that many vulnerable communities are used to living with the intermittent threat and uncertainty, it can be argued that such hazards should not and cannot be perceived as abnormal, exogenous occurrences, but instead they must be perceived as rooted in the social and environmental relations that characterise normal or daily life (Hewitt, 2007).

If we accept that risk must be understood as part and parcel of normal life, then it follows that scholars also have to understand people’s practices in the face of risk in a different light (Van Voorst, 2014, p. 29). In line with this view, the contributions to this theme issue do not present practices that people exhibit in the face of risk as a distinct behavioural form; instead, how people act in the face of risk is understood, at least partly, as expressive of normal life. Hence, from an everyday risk-perspective, we can anticipate that people facing such risk find themselves largely acting according to their routine and daily practices. It is these daily practices of people and the establishment of “normality in extreme situations” that is the core focus of this special issue. However, “normalisation” should not be misunderstood as an expression of “fatalism” – another imposition of a western category on the lived reality of ordinary people.

Overview of papers in this collection

Greg Bankoff adopts an historical-sociological approach combining field work with archival studies and examines strategies that are used by communities and individuals in the Philippines, a context where disasters have become “a fact of life”. Under such circumstances, effective local governance can make a difference to community resilience. Bankoff observes that leadership in the Philippines is often not provided through the formal agencies of government but through unofficial channels of influence.

Maria Ela Linsangan Atienza also discusses the Philippines. She describes how inhabitants of five conflict areas define and strive to attain “security” in a context that is characterized by risk and uncertainty. Contrary to Bankoff’s findings, Atienza finds that local government units (municipalities) can play a crucial role. Atienza’s respondents have a comprehensive view of human security, only they often lack the means to mitigate risk and disaster.

The papers of Roanne van Voorst and Jörgen Hellman describe how slum-dwellers in Jakarta, Indonesia, deal with the everyday hazard of recurrent floods. Flooding is one of the common everyday conditions that “pre-figure” disaster, in the words of Hewitt (1983, pp. 24-27). Hellman shows that where there is seasonal flooding, inundation becomes part of the everyday. To riverbank settlers they are both “normal” and problematic. van Voorst, building upon this insight, shows that different people develop different risk-handling styles for coping with the everyday hazard of floods. These styles evolved over time and are reflected in people’s daily practice. They involve the mobilizing of social networks, the gathering and reproduction of knowledge, and the development of individual skills and capacities.

Dorothea Hilhorst et al. report on research during 2012 that considered the responses of indigenous peoples in the Philippines to a major disaster, and the responses of indigenous people in Thailand to everyday occurring disasters. The authors explore the nature and role of indigenous knowledge in the responses of indigenous peoples to disaster and show how appreciations of indigenous knowledge and coping are framed differently in the two different research settings, in relation to both the particular experience of disaster and the broader socio-economic and political relations. The paper thus shows how disasters may become sites of negotiation over knowledge and disasters, as well as over identity and the relation between indigenous peoples and the state.

Gerben Nooteboom explores the risky practices of youngsters and poor – based on fieldwork in Java and East Kalimantan, Indonesia – and argues for an analytical perspective that includes the risky practices of people themselves. In this way, he challenges the idea that poor people are generally risk averse and that risks are created by outside forces alone. In a social environment where chances for wealth and social success are scarce, risk-taking can be considered an avenue towards higher social status. The fact that people can actively be involved in risky practices and these practices can be beneficial, needs to be taken into account in risk assessments by government and civil society.

Taken together, these papers show that everyday hazards deserve more attention (shifting away the focus somewhat from large, media-genic disasters), as they constitute the daily, dangerous reality of many people. We need to learn much more about the experiences and perceptions of people at risk of these daily hazards, as they can help us understand how people perceive everyday risks and how they cope with them. It is crucial that policy makers pay more attention to the bottom up perspective, that is: people’s own perceptions and interpretations of risk in the context of their life worlds and livelihoods. To establish functional, integrated mitigation systems, short-term “disaster-intervention” is not a viable way forward. What is needed is to establish relations of trust and mutual respect with communities that are quite aware of and knowledgeable about the situation in which they live.

Dr Roanne van Voorst, Sociology and Anthropology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Dr Ben Wisner, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, USA andAon-Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre, University College, London, UK

Dr Jörgen Hellman, Social Anthropology, Gothenburg University, Gothenburg, Sweden, and

Dr Gerben Nooteboom, Anthropology and Sociology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

References

Bankoff, G. (2004), “The eye of the storm: the social construction of the forces of nature and the climatic and seismic construction of God in the Philippines”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 35 No. 1, pp. 91-111, available at: http:// www2.hull.ac.uk/fass/pdf/Eyepdf.pdf

Bankoff, G. (2006), “The tale of the three pigs: taking another look at vulnerability in the light of the Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Katrina”, Perspectives from the social sciences, Understanding Katrina, available at: http://forums.ssrc.org/understandingkatrina/

Bankoff, G., Frerks, G. and Hilhorst, D. (Eds) (2004), Mapping Vulnerability: Disasters, Development and People, Earthscan, London

GNDR (2013), “Online database”, available at : www.globalnetwork-dr.org/images/documents/VFL2013/vfl2013%20reports/GNFULL%2013%20ENGLISH%20FINAL.pdf (accessed 22 June 2015)

Heijmans, A. (2001), “Vulnerability: a matter of perception”, working paper, Benfield Hazard Research Centre, London, November, available at: www.ucl.ac.uk/hazardcentre/resources/working_papers/working_papers_folder/wp4 (accessed 22 June 2015)

Hewitt, K. (1983), “The idea of calamity in a technocratic age”, in Hewitt, K. (Ed.), Interpretations of Calamity from the Viewpoint of Human Ecology, Allen and Unwin, London, pp. 3-32

Hewitt, K. (2007), “Preventable disasters: addressing social vulnerability, institutional risk and civil ethics”, Geographische Rundschau, International Edition, Vol. 3 No. 1, pp. 43-45

IFRC (2015), World Disaster Report 2014: Culture and Risk, IFRC, Geneva

Lopez-Caressi, A., Fordham, M., Wisner, B., Kelman, I. and Gaillard, J.C. (Eds) (2014), Disaster Management: International Lessons in Risk Reduction, Response and Recovery, Earthscan, London

Lupton, D. (1999), Risk, Routledge, New York, NY

McLaughlin, P. and Dietz, T. (2008), “Structure, agency and environment: toward an integrated perspective on vulnerability”, Global Environmental Change, Vol. 18 No. 1, pp. 99-111

Nooteboom, G. (2014), Forgotten People: Poverty, Risk and Social Security in Indonesia: The Case of the Madurese, Brill, Leiden and Boston, MA

UNISDR (2009), Global Assessment of Disaster Risk Reduction 2009, UNISDR, Geneva

UNISDR (2013), Global Assessment of Disaster Risk Reduction 2013, UNISDR, Geneva

UNISDR (2015), Global Assessment of Disaster Risk Reduction 2015, UNISDR, Geneva

Van Voorst, R. (2014), “Get ready for the flood! Risk-handling styles in Jakarta, Indonesia”, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam

Wisner, B. (1993), “Disaster vulnerability: scale, power, and daily life”, GeoJournal, Vol. 30 No. 2, pp. 127-140

Wisner, B. and Gaillard, J.C. (2009), “An introduction to neglected disasters”, Jàmbá: Journal of Disaster Risk Studies, Vol. 2 No. 3, pp. 151-158

Wisner, B., Blaikie, P., Cannon, T. and Davis, I. (2004), “At risk. Natural hazards, people’s vulnerability and disasters”, 2nd ed., Routledge, London and New York.

World Bank (2011), Resettlement Policy Framework (RPF). Jakarta Urgent Flood Mitigation project (JUFMP), Jakarta Capital City Government & World Bank, Jakarta

Further reading

Bankoff, G. (2007), “Living with risk, coping with disasters: hazard as a frequent life experience in the Philippines”, Education About Asia, Vol. 12 No. 2, pp. 26-29

Hewitt, K. (1997), Regions of Risk: A Geographical Introduction to Disasters, Longman, Essex

Slovic, P. (1987), “Perception of risk”, Science, Vol. 236 No. 4799, pp. 280-285

About the editors

Dr Roanne van Voorst defended her PhD Dissertation on flood risk in the beginning of 2014. She is a Post-doctoral Researcher and Lecturer in Anthropology and Asian Studies at the University of Amsterdam, department of Anthropology and Sociology. Dr Roanne van Voorst is the corresponding author and can be contacted at: mailto:r.vanvoorst@uva.nl

Dr Ben Wisner is a Research Affiliate at Oberlin College, USA; and in the Aon-Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre, University College, UK.

Dr Jörgen Hellman is an Associate Professor in Social Anthropology (School of Global Studies) at the Gothenburg University, Sweden.

Dr Gerben Nooteboom is an Assistant Professor in Anthropology and Sociology and Asian Studies at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), the Netherlands.