Institutional arrangements for Disaster/Climate Risk Management: Balancing act

Context

Disaster Risk Management or climate Risk Management is emerging as a discipline; however, elements of the topic have been in existence for several decades and centuries. For example, the relief code for drought has been formulated and is in practice in India since 19th century. Similarly, the traders in mediaeval age have been using monsoon/wind information for sailing decisions. The recent years and decades have tried to make this topic to look things comprehensively, which led to its emergence as a discipline. Disaster risk management can be broken into two key streams. The first stream is addressing risk in development interventions, which entails that the drivers of disaster risk are hidden in development and risk reduction is not externality to development. The second stream of activities are linked warning, search and rescue, evacuation, etc. which has limited dependence on development sectors. It led to disaster risk management as being a cross-cutting issue at the same time a separate discipline and perhaps this debate will continue. Similar issues are in climate risk management.

Crux of the matter  

The dual nature of disster risk management i.e. cross-cutting and standalone requires a unique institutional arrangement. The entity should be a coordination entity for risk reduction with development sectors and at the same time an entity which has expertise for swift coordinated response. The existing institutional arrangements in many countries have emerged (or perceived) as a standalone entity for disaster risk management. It has led to improved capacity and result in managing disaster or its impact i.e. loss of lives especially in case of hydrometeorological disasters, the number of deaths has come down. The standalone approach (or perceived) has led development sectors such as housing, infrastructure, etc. to see disaster risk as an externality or the domain of the agency created for it. Thus, improvement in risk reduction is less compared to management of disasters. However, in order to push the agenda of disaster risk management or bring paradigm shift from response to risk management creation of a dedicated agency can be an essential (!) hazard.

Navigating the duality

I think the solution lies in leadership of the institution as it requires a fine balance to navigate the duality. The institution arrangements require flexibility and a strong leadership and trust from the highest level. The strong leadership equally means invisible or leading from behind, which is essential to perform the task of risk reduction. The trust from highest leadership will help in marching ahead the agenda of risk reduction, which might not be visible, or the disaster risk management agency may not be driving it from front.