The Social Roots of Risk: Producing Disasters, Promoting Resilience

Citation

David Oliver Kasdan (2016), "The Social Roots of Risk: Producing Disasters, Promoting Resilience", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 25 No. 1, pp. 111-114. https://doi.org/10.1108/DPM-09-2015-0213

The message of The Social Roots of Risk is akin to the paternalistic admonition about playing with fire and the likelihood of getting burned. In this case, Kathleen Tierney is telling us that our social behaviors, from the political forces behind economic development to the cultural practices brought about by western cowboy-pioneer attitudes, tend to increase our exposure to the fire hazard. It is not the fire’s fault, but rather that we are culpable for the damages in many cases and it is incumbent on society to be more responsible with our playthings. Failing a transformational change, we should at least do a better job of keeping the medical kit stocked with salves.

The book operates to some degree as an after action review; it looks at a variety of past disasters with a critical eye, highlighting instances when society has willingly, if not intentionally, exacerbated disaster effects and what that hindsight should prescribe for future mitigation. The book analyzes natural events, industrial accidents, and even the global recession as sharing common catalysts rooted in our social predilections. By no means does Tierney suggest that these disasters are completely our fault, but a considerable amount of the fallout can be attributed to our behaviors and activities. The book is a complement to Perrow’s (1999) classic, Normal Accidents; in fact, he gives testament to its value on the back cover. This joins a growing body of literature that suggests the next phase of disaster management should not be fixated on developing so much technical hardware and improved predictive modeling as much as an effort to rethink societies as having a more malleable position vis-à-vis hazards and resilience capacities (Ha, 2014). Tierney introduces her purpose as such:

The idea that disasters are socially produced represents a departure from current and historical ways in which disasters have been characterized. Looking at disasters as social productions requires a shift in thinking, away from the notion that the forces of nature – or in the case of financial catastrophes, human nature – produce disasters and toward a fuller understanding of the role that social, political, economic, and cultural factors play in making events disastrous. A key contribution of this book is to connect events that the general public, the media, and many risk scholars consider unique events and to show that despite their surface differences, such occurrences can be traced back to similar causal factors (p. 5).

There are several themes that run throughout the book: social inequity, technological hubris, unchecked development, and risk (mis-)perceptions. Echoing the work by varied scholars from such fields as political science (Burby, 2006) and economics (Kunreuther et al., 2013), Tierney accuses the political economy as the driver of all these ills, belying an activist agenda of social justice tempered with more than a hint of the liberal academic worldview. It is the prerogative of the monograph to develop ideas at length and with a voice that is not restrained by the formalities of neutral journal-style writing; Tierney has her bona fides in years of research and consulting, so the opinions are well earned. I provide this caution merely to support the book’s style and trust in that the author’s general references to “past research” are legitimate without necessitating a docket’s worth of citations.

I came to read this book upon the recommendation of an expert from the administrative side of disaster management, hoping to round out some of the social considerations for disaster risk governance found in recent reports, such as the World Disasters Report: Focus on Culture and Risk (IFRC, 2014) and the Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction: Revealing Risk, Redefining Development (UNISDR, 2011). It provided encouragement insofar as Tierney provides learned support for many of our intuitive thoughts about disaster risks, which could lead to consensus for better mitigation and preparedness. For example, Chapter 4 devotes considerable space to how cultural behaviors influence perceptions of risk, including behavioral economics concepts of framing and the idea of the “continuity heuristic” (p. 74). Peppered throughout are insightful nuggets that might not be realized from a singular study. For example, there is the discussion of how outcome bias affects policy support because near miss events are counted as emergency management successes that might actually fuel more risk-taking behaviors (pp. 120-121). This hearkens back to Birkland’s (2006) volume and helps to place this book in the panoply of social research perspectives to complement the emergency management engineering and policy research streams.

The book’s subtitle, “Producing Disasters, Promoting Resilience,” is a bit misleading as the first six chapters focus on how society has done a fairly thorough job of increasing the risk of disasters by essentially magnifying the threat of hazards through our social practices. The last three chapters address the resilience part of the book’s promise, although Chapter 9 splits its time between hope and despair. In terms of the classic disaster management cycle, Tierney is focussed on the strategic stages of mitigation and recovery, leaving the more tactical aspects of preparedness and response to more technical disciplines while not blindly accepting that we can just engineer our way out of trouble.

The book does an admirable job of tying together its real focus in Chapter 8, where the idea of adaptive resilience is worked out to good effect: “Bureaucratic organizations and command-and-control hierarchies don’t work nearly as well in disaster situations as decentralized decision making and action by those who understand their own communities and are sensitive to local problems and needs” (p. 203). This idea is in the home turf of sociology, so Tierney strings together some fundamentals from her discipline to make a clear presentation of how social phenomena, such as emergent multiorganizational networks (p. 204) and collective creativity, can have positive impacts on disaster recovery. Indeed, this chapter reads as if it were adapted from a standalone journal article as it puts together so much of the rest of the book’s ideas into a more dense and forceful argument. The key lesson to be learned here is that emergency managers need to leverage these social phenomena in the mitigation and preparedness stages, essentially figuring out a way of “crowdsourcing” disaster management. The argument is that social capital and informal networks can foster solutions that are outside the purview of official protocols:

Many emergency management and homeland security programs focus on critical infrastructure protection and resilience, largely framed as efforts to insure that […] systems remain operational when disasters or terrorist attacks take place. Significantly less emphasis is placed on enhancing the resilience of our critical civic infrastructure, the community-, faith-, and culturally based institutions and groupings that provide connection and support […] to which vulnerable populations turn during times of crisis (p. 224, italics in original).

The book has an enduring message of support for more social equity in disaster management that resonates with contemporary concerns for rising wealth and income disparity, as evidenced by the popularity of Picketty’s (2014) tome, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Tierney denies the adage that disasters are “great levelers, victimizing rich and poor alike” (p. 141), arguing that:

A substantial literature indicates that the disaster vulnerability of individuals and groups is associated with a number of socioeconomic factors […] The general pattern seen across numerous studies is that many of the same factors that disadvantage members of society on a daily basis also play out during disasters (p. 141).

Tierney directs much of her criticism at the current political economy, as she adds, “that conditions and practices that have a negative effect on social capital undermine disaster resilience capabilities” and “official responses to disasters tend to overlook the need to protect and restore social capital” (p. 236). In some sense, the book fills the space between the work of Normal Accidents (Perrow, 1999) and Bowling Alone (Putnam, 2000) by bridging the concepts of complex systems and declining social capital. Although Tierney does not explicitly put those works together, she does cite them both and one could plausibly base a thesis connecting those significant ideas by using The Social Roots of Risk as a springboard.

The book also provides fuel to the fire of frustrations and despondency experienced by emergency management professionals who face significant obstacles to getting the necessary support for consensus. That is to say that I was nodding my head in agreement with Tierney’s assessments about how we have come to be in the state of risk that we find ourselves while also shaking my head in disappointment over the irrational behaviors that we display across all levels of society. As a public administration scholar, I recognized that there is a lot that a bureaucrat could borrow from the book to bolster requests for more substantial and purposeful program support; i.e. redirecting the budget to reflect equitable social concerns over instrumental solutions: “[…] the origins of risk, harm, and loss are primarily social, not natural or technological” (p. 83).

The draw of The Social Roots of Risk is its multi-disciplinary approach. Although Tierney – like Charles Perrow – is a sociologist and tells the story with a much more accessible narrative style, the impact is stronger than the reserved and cautiously qualified conclusions offered by formal academic papers. In other words, The Social Roots of Risk is very readable while nonetheless having a coherent objective backed by solid research and well-considered rationale. If there is any shortcoming to this approach for the non-sociologist, it is that the interpretations of the empirical assume a common world-view; that is to say that a sober economist would balk at Tierney’s normative (but sensible) prescriptions while a seismologist might not appreciate some of the associative relationships between natural and social phenomena. But the economist, the seismologist, actuaries, and others concerned with the effects of disasters could benefit by sharing this perspective at times. Emergency managers of all disciplinary backgrounds would do well to surreptitiously place a copy of the book on their supervisor’s desk.

Tierney is worried about technological hubris and the financial engineering shenanigans that create a false sense of security in social development. The dynamics of the human condition and our environment are not sufficiently met by the belief that we can solve the problems of disasters by positive prescription. The forces of the political economy that push development are also resistant to much of the alternative understandings of risk: if it can be institutionalized and insured, then it must be safe enough! This condition is dominant today, proving too profitable to adapt in what will presumably be an even more complex society with ever new forms and levels of risk:

The problem is that current attempts to reduce disaster-related risks are incremental rather than transformational. One major shortcoming of mainstream approaches is that advocates for disaster risk reduction typically focus on bringing about reforms of the kind that fall within the purview of institutions with specific disaster-related responsibilities [much like the efforts of the UNISDR and the 2015 Sendai Framework]. However, risk buildup is driven by other more powerful institutions that unless checked will continue to cause risks to proliferate (p. 239).

This accusation would be on par with conspiracy theory if it were not so frighteningly true. Tierney does more than hint that profiteering and corruption are as much to blame as natural forces (which themselves are being influenced by human activity’s effect on climate change). With current research looking at such new concerns as the relationships between hydraulic fracturing and earthquakes, this book is a timely exposition that will probably – and unfortunately – continue to play out for the foreseeable future. The call for transformational change in disaster risk management that Tierney issues is not a nuisance, it is a necessity.

About the reviewer

David Oliver Kasdan is a Professor in the Department of Public Administration and the Director of the Crisis Management Research Center at the Incheon National University, Korea. His previous work has focussed on emergency financial management with publications in Urban Affairs Review and Administration & Society. His current research is focussed on determinants of efficient and effective levels of disaster risk management based on contextual variables across different countries. David Oliver Kasdan can be contacted at: dokasdan@gmail.com