Extractivism and the engendering of disasters: disaster risk creation in the era of the Anthropocene
Abstract
Purpose
This paper argues that extractivist logic creates the environmental conditions that produce “natural” hazards and also the human conditions that produce vulnerability, which combined create disasters. Disaster Risk Creation is then built into the current global socio-economic system, as an integral component not accidental by-product.
Design/methodology/approach
As part of the movement to liberate disasters as discipline, practice and field of enquiry, this paper does not talk disasters per se, but rather its focus is on “extractivism” as a fundamental explanator for the anthropogenic disaster landscape that now confronts us.
Findings
Applying a gender lens to extractivism as it relates to disaster, further highlights that Disaster Risk Management rather than alleviating, creates the problems it seeks to solve, suggesting the need to liberate gender from Disaster Risk Management, and the need to liberate us all from the notion of managing disasters. Since to ‘manage’ disaster risk is to accept uncritically the structures and systems that create that risk, then if we truly want to address disasters, our focus needs to be on the extractive practices, not the disastrous outcomes.
Originality/value
The fundamental argument is that through privileging the notion of “disaster” we create it, bring it into existence, as something that exists in and of itself, apart from wider socio-economic structures and systems of extraction and exploitation, rather than recognising it for what it is, an outcome/end product of those wider structures and systems. Our focus on disaster is then misplaced, and perhaps what disaster studies needs to be liberated from, is itself.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This paper draws in part on work on extractive industries previously undertaken with Brian Linneker and Lisa Overton - many thanks for our fruitful past and future collaborations. Thanks also to participants at the workshop ‘Feminist Roadmap for Sustainable Peace and Planet’ hosted by the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights in December 2022, for igniting my interest in extractivism as a feminist issue. To the anonymous reviewers and the editors of this edition - thank you for your insightful comments that helped shape this paper and my thinking.
Citation
Bradshaw, S. (2024), "Extractivism and the engendering of disasters: disaster risk creation in the era of the Anthropocene", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/DPM-06-2023-0146
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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