The Marginalization of Disaster Response Institutions: The El Nino Experience in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador

Citation

Wilson, H.C. (2001), "The Marginalization of Disaster Response Institutions: The El Nino Experience in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 10 No. 2, pp. 110-111. https://doi.org/10.1108/dpm.2001.10.2.110.3

The South American countries of Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia experienced a major El Nino event in 1982‐1983 and again in 1997‐1998. This publications investigates how the lessons learned from the first event were incorporated into the second event. However, the researchers found that many of the lessons from the earlier event were lost, primarily because of the lack of prior planning and the political exigencies that emerged when the second event became a “catastrophe”.

The principal finding is that while the civil defence organisations in the respective countries were the nominal “national emergency organisations” at the outset, each was rapidly pushed to the sidelines, i.e. marginalized, by one or more new but temporary governmental organisations charged with managing the response. This lead to duplication, confusion, and loss of credibility and morale in each country’s civil defence structures.