Critical analysis of participatory disaster resilience programming in Jamaica. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with Jamaica's national disaster management agency, argues that resilience operates through an affective economy of fear, hope, and confidence that enacts an immunitary biopolitics.
Cohen,Marc J. (Author) and Gauthier,Amelie (Author)
Format:
Pamphlet
Publication Date:
Mar 2011
Published:
Real Instituto Elcano de Estudios Internacionales y Estrategicos
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
7 p., Following the 20 March 2011 elections, Haiti faces a potential political stalemate whilst confronting the massive reconstruction needs created by last year's earthquake. Many organizations have criticized the government for its lack of leadership in addressing pressing issues of relief, relocation and reconstruction. This paper analyses the effects of the political situation on aid effectiveness, good governance and the strategies of the international community.
9 pp., This briefing is submitted by the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition (DSCC), a coalition of over 70 non-governmental organizations concerned about the deep sea. The deep sea is facing large-scale industrial exploitation as mining of the deep seabed for minerals fast becomes reality. Deep seabed mining poses a major threat to the oceans, which are already suffering from a number of pressures including overfishing, pollution, and the effects of climate change.
Jamaica's water supply sector is recognized as the largest electricity consumer in the island's public sector. This paper evaluates whether replacing high-cost groundwater abstraction with surface water treatment and distribution is a viable option to minimize electricity consumption in the water sector.
Through a genealogy of Jamaican disaster management, shows how participatory and mitigation techniques were deterritorialized from marginalized experiences of disaster and reterritorialized into mitigation policies through the confluence of local disaster events and the global emergence of sustainable development and resilience theory.
Hundreds of thousands are likely to have died, millions are in need, their homes having been lost. Many wait for medical care. Safe water is in short supply and the rainy season starts in May. Could it have been different in Haiti? Would good planning have eased the pain of the shocks?
Considers the potential contribution of traditional construction techniques and materials to rebuilding in Port-au-Prince and other areas in Haiti that were devastated by the 2010 earthquake. Based on different examples of housing that collapsed or was damaged by the earthquake, it shows how traditional construction systems often demonstrated better resilience to earthquakes than buildings constructed with modern materials.
La Via Campesina asserts that sustainable, small-scale farming is more efficient at conserving and increasing biodiversity and forests than industrial agriculture.
Landslides pose a serious physical and environmental threat to vulnerable communities living in areas of unplanned housing on steep slopes in the Caribbean. Some of these communities have, in the past, had to be relocated, at costs of millions of dollars, because of major slides triggered by tropical storm rainfall. Even so, evidence shows that: (1) risk reduction is a marginal activity; (2) there has been minimal uptake of hazard maps and vulnerability assessments and (3) there is little on-the-ground delivery of construction for risk reduction. This article directly addresses these issues by developing a low-cost approach to the identification of the potential pore pressure changes that trigger such slides.
