ReliefWeb

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

People living in insecure contexts are facing terrible problems – and they’re getting worse. Insecure contexts are often characterised by conflict, weak governance, insufficient food, little clean water, scarce medical services and malnutrition. The people living there are very vulnerable to natural hazards, such as flooding, drought and earthquakes because there is insufficient infrastructure or planning to help them cope. For very similar reasons, they are also vulnerable to the threats of insecurity, criminality and conflict. Many of these insecure contexts are in areas suffering from a self-reinforcing spiral where conflict creates more vulnerability to disaster and more vulnerability to disaster creates further conflict. This is compounded by climate change, environmental degradation, market fragility, economic marginalisation, migration and unplanned urbanisation – some of the drivers which are exposing more people to more hazards. At the same time, they are eroding the resilience of people to these hazards.

Aid institutions are trying to help, but many are too disjointed to do so effectively. Each has disparate policies, teams and operations for disaster risk management (DRM) and for insecurity programming (IP).

Paradoxically, where ODA investment in peacebuilding, governance and security operations has greatly increased over the last decade, investment in DRR by donors remains at pitiful levels. This also mirrored in low DRR investment for humanitarian assistance. This means that the powerful benefit of DRM investments have not been understood by both long- and short-term donor initiatives and by those investing in insecure contexts.

This paper demonstrates how the integration of disaster risk management with insecurity programming can expand the scope of risk management to the mutual benefit of communities and aid agencies.

To get there without danger of causing harm, DRM programming has to be ‘conflict sensitive’ and peacebuilding has to be ‘hazard-proof’. The common objectives and the combined impact of the various approaches to DRM, IP and relief and recovery operations can be harnessed to develop a longterm strategy leading to peace and a resilience to all forms of threats and hazards. The integration of these approaches would lead to more streamlined operations and a more efficient use of funds. This is particularly important because diminishing aid budgets will find it more and more difficult to meet humanitarian and development needs.

The choice of applying DRM should not be limited to whether a context is secure or insecure, because insecurity is a matter of degrees. However, there are two thresholds in that continuum where DRM objectives and modalities should be adapted:

1. When low threat on people becomes medium threat: programming should concentrate on being prepared and on intervening in order to reduce vulnerability and mitigate disaster.

2. When medium threat on people becomes high threat: programming is less feasible at the community level, and should expand at the household level where aid agencies should intervene directly to save lives and livelihoods. This means altering the objectives and the complexity of activities to something less ambitious, striving for short-term impact. At the same time, though, the seeds of stability are being planted for later sustainability by structuring activities for long-term peace building.

In conjunction with IP, many of the existing approaches to DRM used in ‘normal circumstances’ can also be used in insecure contexts. These include livelihoods and conflict, climate change and security, environment and conflict, social protection and fragile states, and, human rights. Furthermore, there are approaches to DRM and IP which benefit the community, by fomenting social cohesion and equity, by building resilience to insecurity and by improving local governance and institutions.

Concretely, programming can be adapted to many insecure contexts by using a graduated management system based on multi-hazard threats surveillance and an early warning system (EWS). This calls for an ‘open vision’ of risk that encompasses all hazards and threats and places insecurity at the heart of programming, rather than as a filter or as a ‘risk and assumption’. Here, the changes in the way that communities, external actors and institutions relate to each other define the way that operations are conducted and how much the community can get involved. At the same time, expert organisations are welded together under a shared and long-term strategy.