Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Disaster Justice in Asias Urban Anthropocene
Disaster Justice in Asias Urban Anthropocene
Disaster Justice in Asias Urban Anthropocene
Abstract
The essays in this themed collection critically engage with questions of environmental disaster
justice from historical and contemporary perspectives. The contributions are geographically
centred on urbanising societies in six countries in South, East, and Southeast Asia: India, the
Philippines, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, and Japan. Among the first multidisciplinary efforts to
develop the concept of disaster justice and to explore it through the lens of Asia’s urban transition
in the Anthropocene, the intention is to push boundaries of research longitudinally and at multiple
spatial scales to identify macro as well as micro levels of disaster causalities and justice issues.
Differentiated from such allied concepts as environmental justice and climate justice, disaster
justice is concerned with how issues of socioecological justice are brought to the political fore by
moments of crisis, rupture, and displacement. Our central premise is that disaster justice is a
moral claim on governance, which arises from anthropogenic interventions in nature that incubate
environmental crises and magnify their socially and spatially uneven impacts. Posing disaster justice
as a problem of governance thus acknowledges that disasters always occur in political spaces,
which necessitate more equitable and inclusive modes of disaster preparedness, response and
redress for the underlying inequalities that contribute to conditions of compounded risk and
precarity. Viewed through the lens of governance, hope is found in expressions of collective
agency to effect transformative changes that focus on three main dimensions of disaster
justice: the underlying social and spatial processes leading to uneven patterns of vulnerability,
participatory forms of disaster governance, and just distribution of resources to support recovery
and social resilience.
Keywords
Anthropocene, Asia, disaster justice, governance, urbanisation
Corresponding author:
Mike Douglass, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, AS8 Level 7, 10 Kent Ridge Crescent, Singapore
SG 128036, Singapore.
Email: michaeld@hawaii.edu
272 Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1(3)
Asia’s accelerated urban transition are radically altering the geographies and temporal
dynamics of risk and vulnerability to environmental disasters in Asia, with clear
implications for the combined capacities of Asia’s rapidly changing societies to build
resilience to future threats and crises (Miller and Douglass, 2016b). The emergence of the
Anthropocene signals a new epoch in which human actions have become leading
contributors of changes to the biosphere and the global climate. Attendant anthropogenic
impacts include widespread land degradation, deforestation, ocean acidification, and
biodiversity deterioration. Urban centres, as sites of industrialisation and centres that
control the appropriation of environmental resources from rural and remote hinterlands,
are substantially adding to anthropogenic transformations of the environment. Urbanisation
in Asia is also shifting significant sections of national populations from rural communities to
rapidly expanding urban agglomerations that are located in precarious coastal areas and
riparian regions, where exposure to effects of the Anthropocene is the most pronounced.
These converging megatrends of the Anthropocene and urbanisation mean that moments
of crisis, rupture, and displacement can no longer be viewed as isolated events and need to be
seen longitudinally in terms of accumulating pressures on socioecological systems and
mounting challenges to prevailing political structures. Asia’s transition from rural to
urban societies is changing the geographies of risk and exposure to environmental threats
by displacing intergenerational systems of acquired adaptation while creating new claims to
justice around issues such as land ownership, the right to dwell in the city, and participation
in governance. Such emerging justice claims precede and extend well beyond the moment of
crisis, but become amplified when disasters overwhelm official capacities, producing a
vacuum in state authority and exacerbating competition over limited recovery resources.
Here, the term justice, as a moral claim that entails rights, fairness, and entitlements, requires
rethinking in both spatial and temporal terms. Calls for justice are rendered the most visible
during disasters, which affect societies socially, spatially, and economically unevenly (Eda,
2015). Although disastrous events accelerate the urgency of claims to justice and redress for
perceived injustices, the underlying causalities of environmental threats and crises can often
be traced back to an incubation period in the form of anthropogenic interventions into
nature and unequal socio-spatial relations. To better understand how these underlying
processes manifest in times of crisis, this special issue brings together research based
on sustained critical engagement with localities in Asia to conceptualise and assess
situated instantiations of environmental disaster justice from historical and contemporary
perspectives.
As a concept, disaster justice overlaps with allied literature on environmental justice and
climate justice. Yet the premise of this collection is that disaster justice merits its own
consideration for at least three reasons. First, a disaster is widely defined as a calamitous
event that exceeds the combined capacities, collective resources, and normal functioning of
an impacted community or society (IFRCRCS, 2017: 1). Because environmental
perturbations violently disrupt normal channels through which to pursue justice, disasters
tend to take on justice dimensions that move beyond conventional resolution of an
environmental problem. For example, the location of a waste site near a poor community
is identified as the issue that ignited the United States-led environmental justice movement in
the 1980s. Such situations, which have specific causalities, unambiguous focal points, and
legislative frameworks through which to pursue resolution to justice claims, can be
contrasted with environmental disasters that entail widespread social and economic harm,
disarray in government functions, the displacement of large groups of people, the sudden
fracture or collapse of communities, and a paralysis in spheres of governmental authority.
From this perspective, while disaster justice might be considered by some to be a form
Douglass and Miller 273
who justified their hold on power as mediators between heaven and earth, with disasters
understood to be acts of God or nature rather than being directly caused by human actions.
As explained by Bankoff in this special edition, the contemporary shift towards recognition
of human culpability in the occurrence of disasters manifests a change from cultural
understandings of disaster impacts as God’s punishments or chance misfortunes to
contemporary claims of social injustice.
The advent of the Anthropocene has added to the complexity of disaster justice claims as
disasters that were once regarded as ‘natural’ are increasingly understood to have
intertwining anthropogenic and natural causalities, leading to greater acceptance of the
term ‘environmental disasters’, to which we subscribe in this themed issue. Debates
continue concerning when the Anthropocene began, as well as the role of anthropogenic
causalities in contributing to particular environmental perturbations, and projections of this
geological trajectory into the future. However, an overwhelming agreement exists among
scientists that its effects have tremendously accelerated from the 1950s. Further, even with a
wide range of estimates, current assessments are that climate change will generate immense
impacts for generations to come around the globe (IPCC, 2014).1 Today, a consensus is also
building on the understanding that while climate changes might be slowed or even stopped if
concerted actions are taken immediately, they cannot be reversed in the foreseeable future
(Harris, 2009; Harvey, 2017). Given these dynamics, the Anthropocene constitutes a
formidable dimension of disasters and associated vulnerabilities of large segments of the
world’s population. Its impacts are occurring in combinations of multiple events, such as
extreme weather events, sea rise, and heat waves that severely limit efforts towards long-term
solutions at the level of impacted areas. In recognising the complexities of climate change
and other anthropogenic impacts on the environment, the term ‘chronic disaster’ is being
used to describe this new era of multiple overlapping disasters that are not only repeated, but
which also cascade into compound disasters that extend disaster conditions over
indeterminable periods of time (Raleigh et al., 2010).2
Tracking the dynamics of urbanisation similarly illuminates the spatially and socially
uneven patterns of vulnerability to environmental change in the Anthropocene (Verchick,
2012). The pattern of rural to urban migration across Asia has led large populations to
relocate to environmentally degraded slums and peri-urban areas that are unsafe for human
settlement, such as landslide-prone hillsides and denuded riverbanks that experience
seasonal flooding. In Asia, where half of a billion people live in urban slums (UNESCAP,
2016), a corresponding regional trend of impressive records of national economic growth is
incubating new claims to injustice amidst a widening wealth gap. Recent research has found
that almost all of the largest urban agglomerations in Asia are ‘critically unprepared’ to
respond to environmental disasters such as flooding (GreenAsh, 2013). For slum dwellers
who are the most exposed to the threat of environmental disasters, such findings highlight
the lived reality of urban precarity. At the neighbourhood scale, the vulnerability of slum
residents is exacerbated by upstream environmental damage as well as by urban mega-
projects that cover cityscapes with non-porous surfaces while further pushing low-income
households into high disaster risk areas (Padawangi and Douglass, 2016). In slums, self-
reliance is often the only recourse to disaster resilience in the absence of access to official
programmes and funding. As grassroots efforts grow and find communities, so do calls for
disaster justice that extend into issues of the right to the city (Lefebvre, 1991), livelihoods,
neighbourhood mutual assistance, and voice in governance.
In parallel with patterns of chronic disasters that are being amplified by the megatrends of
the Anthropocene and rural-to-urban migration across Asia, an allied term of ‘chronic
displacement’ has been coined by IDMC (2016) to underscore how migration from
Douglass and Miller 275
disaster-prone areas related to climate change has become the principal means of adaptation
to environmental disruptions (Powell, 2017). While, as noted, cities face their own high risks
of exposure to environmental hazards, their agglomeration effects equally provide migrants
with niches in the urban economy that are unavailable in many disaster-struck rural areas.
The continuing lack of official recognition of rural-to-urban migrants adds to the many ways
in which the spatially and socially uneven sources and impacts of climate change are
expanding the spatial scale for disaster justice far beyond the initial disaster site
(Mukherji et al., 2018). In the past, most disaster-related displacements were contained
within the national territory in which the crisis occurred. However, recent experiences and
projections of climate change-related disasters predict that tens of millions will be forced
to move beyond national borders well before the end of this century (Harvey, 2017;
Schultz, 2014).
Noting such a broad historical shift does not mean that that governments of past eras
were not held accountable for failures to prevent disasters or that local knowledges were not
cognisant of human complicity in intensifying the impacts of disasters. For example,
Confucianist rule in China was based on the Mandate of Heaven, which provided for the
right to contest perceived failures of government that included preventing flooding,
droughts, famines, or damage from earthquakes. Throughout Asia, water systems were
subject to continuous attempts to manage flows, including flooding, and water
distribution (Szczepanski, 2017). China, from at least 4000 years ago, rewarded
‘leadership that attached importance to flood management, development of flood
prevention technology and education of flood management specialists’ (Luo et al., 2015:
268). Yet despite the sweep of history towards greater cognisance of human responsibilities
for disasters, many contemporary governments within and beyond Asia seek to absolve
themselves of responsibility by consigning environmental perturbations to the realm of
unexpected natural occurrences or the wider forces of global climate change that are
beyond their abilities to prevent (Ambu, 2015).
Here, the main point to be made is that ideas of disaster justice and types of
responsibilities associated with it are inseparable from the organisation of power and its
normative foundations for governance. In acknowledging that important exceptions exist
today, history has witnessed a shift from government as mediator of natural or heavenly
forces towards more secular forms of authority that, in the case of Asia and much of the rest
of the world, sustain their legitimacy through distributive justice associated with notions of
development. These are enshrined by sovereign post-colonial states and international
organisations like the United Nations and the World Bank. Disaster justice is in turn
linked with the rights of citizens to make claims through such established systems of
governance to ensure fairness is the distribution of resources and services to prevent,
respond to, and recover from disasters.
The idea of human entanglement in perpetuating disasters and conditions of injustice
through the uneven socio-economic impacts of such events has been gaining intellectual
currency since the late 20th century (DI, 2016). A signal event was the 1995 Great
Hanshin (Kobe) earthquake, in which more than 6000 people died and 400,000 buildings
were damaged. This disaster led to the 2005 Hyogo Framework for Action 2005–2015:
Building the Resilience of Nations and Communities to Disasters (HFA). As the first
international plan to focus on reducing disaster loses through concerted national and
international action for disaster resilience, the Hyogo Framework is based on the premise
that disasters are not just natural events, but they are also the product of social, political,
and economic processes. It also argues that ‘the risks involved in disasters must be connected
with the vulnerability created for many people through their normal existence’ (p. 4).
276 Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1(3)
multiple forms, including exploitation, forced labour, forced marriages, benefit fraud,
pornography, organ removal, child soldiers, selling children, and forced begging. The
understanding that disasters can have such sinister compound effects remains
understudied and must be factored into disaster justice research.
At the same time, the emerging disaster studies scholarship tends to assume fixed subject
positions for the categories of marginalised people who are at greatest risk of becoming
disaster victims, without critically interrogating their agency to pursue justice. For instance,
women are typically cast as the primary victims of disasters, together with children, ethnic
and religious minorities, the handicapped, elderly, and the poor. Notwithstanding the highly
gendered vulnerabilities of disaster recovery trajectories, women are also more likely to
possess knowledge of emergency services, expertise in care-giving roles, and strong social
capital than their male counterparts, thereby suggesting a level of agency that tends to be
overlooked in gendered disaster discourses. In his contribution to this special issue,
D. Parthasarathy critically interrogates the agency of another group of marginalised
people, the informal riverbank settlers of Mumbai, to make a case for the deployment of
disaster justice as a conceptual lens through which to formulate more inclusive policy choices
and disaster programmes as a means of finding redress for forms of disaster governance that
entrench inequalities and social deprivations.
Disaster justice illuminates the ways in which anthropogenic sources of environmental
crises at all scales are routinely obscured in the politics and structures of governance.
Whereas environmental justice research has primarily concentrated on ‘bottom-up’
community justice in response to external threats (Agyeman, 2005; Chaudhary et al.,
2018), the emerging research on climate justice has been characterised by bipolar trends.
At one end of the spectrum, climate justice research has attended to the international or
regional dimensions of climate change (Adger et al., 2006; Anand, 2017; Gonzalez and
Atapattu, 2017; Harris, 2010). Conversely, a grassroots focus is emerging on situated
and emplaced climate justice issues, especially in relation to gender, indigeneity, and
environmental migrants/climate refugees (Terry, 2009; Tsosie, 2007; Westra, 2009). While
both environmental and climate justice perspectives are important in informing the allied
concept of disaster justice, the devastation wrought by disasters that increasingly cannot be
contained within jurisdictions raises complex questions of justice across multiple scales of
governance. It also necessitates multidisciplinary epistemologies and research methods
capable of linking causalities across space and time. As regional and global environmental
transformations continually change the geographies of vulnerability, they are adding new
dimensions to disaster governance and justice. In drawing from urban theorist Edward Soja
(2010), who argued that justice cannot be understood through aspatial institutional analysis,
our understanding of disaster justice underscores that human engagement in the production
of space can be either oppressive or progressive at variable locations and for different
populations (Lefebvre, 1991). The challenge for disaster justice is thus to achieve a ‘fair
and equitable distribution in space of socially valued resources and the opportunities to
use them’ (Soja, 2008: 2). As the studies in this collection reveal, who commands the
production of space, for what purposes, and for whom is a critical dimension of disaster
justice and injustice at multiple scales.
As compound disasters extend in space and time in the urbanising Anthropocene, new
frontiers of institutional mechanisms for adjudicating justice claims need to be explored.
As dilemmas of justice are continually being framed and scaled vertically ‘up’ and ‘out’
across sub-national and national borders, an emerging literature on adaptive justice and
global justice is grappling with complex moral and political economy issues of distributive
justice as they play out at ground level (Paavola and Adger, 2006; Scholsberg, 2012;
Douglass and Miller 279
Vanderheiden, 2008; Walker, 2012). To these perspectives, the call for disaster justice can be
seen as advocacy for more of this kind of research and, equally important, for creating the
political means to achieve it.
people in harm’s way, this statement is central to disaster justice as a moral claim against
unfairness and even villainy in contributing to events of great harm that differentially impact
some people more than others. In defining disaster justice as an issue of social vulnerabilities
associated with disaster risk that arise from as a combination of physical and social factors,
he draws from the writings of Sen (1979) and Cutter et al. (2003) to extend justice into areas
of social circumstances and human capabilities that lead to the necessity for urban residents
to participate in public decision-making about the enabling social and physical assets of their
communities.
Verchick also brings to the fore two other key dimensions of disasters that are of
particular relevance to Asia’s ongoing urban transition. One is that as ‘physical and social
vulnerabilities come stacked on top of one another’ in cities, the compound effects of
disasters become more complex. Access to land, housing, livelihoods, social networks,
and basic services intertwine to potentially extend disaster recovery indeterminably into
the future. Another dimension is the need for multi-scalar understandings of disasters.
At the highest scale is the advent of the Anthropocene and global climate change that
brings sea rise, droughts, and unusual weather events into play with national and local
government actions, societal forces generating inequalities and inequities among people,
and down to neighbourhoods and individual experiences in preparing for and coping with
disasters. Both the longitudinal and multi-scalar framing of disasters are crucial for disaster
research.
A country that lies in the heart of East Asia’s ‘Typhoon Alley’ with 20 volcanoes and
daily earthquakes, the Philippines’ record of persistent poverty presents vivid stories of how
people have had to learn to live with and expect environmental disasters in their daily
routines. In his study of Albay in southern Luzon, Greg Bankoff draws from the
Philippine experiences to define disaster justice as ‘the moral and legal responsibility of
government to protect all its citizens to a minimally acceptable level’. Adopting a
historical perspective, he presents the thesis that claims for disaster justice are made
possible by a twofold shift from the belief that disasters are all a matter of collective guilt
about transgressions against God (divine justice) to being a matter of misfortune (natural
justice), and only from the 1970s to the recognition that social structures have responsibility.
In particular, as government regimes overtly engage in claiming control over disaster
responses, which amounts to a ‘nationalization of disasters’, the higher are expectations of
state performance. Yet in the Philippine setting, the ambiguities of populist relations with
civil society organisations plus continuing weaknesses in state capacities mean that
government is never able to fully meet expectations. The result is that disaster justice
claims that arise from high repetition and intensity of disasters shine light on persistent
inequities and therefore lack of trust in government.
Shu-Mei Huang presents a comparative study of two indigenous communities in southern
Taiwan to illuminate the ways in which questions of disaster justice play out differently even
when occurring in the same political context. As with several other contributions to this
special issue, she points towards the ways in which socio-economic and anthropogenic
damage to the environment conditions tracked from the 1930s to the present created
socially and spatially uneven vulnerabilities to disasters. She moves beyond assessments
compartmentalised by a narrow time frame of a disaster event to give attention to the
socio-spatial production of risk. In the case of Taiwan, a highly significant feature of
increasing vulnerabilities is identified as urbanisation processes that have simultaneously
displaced indigenous people from their community land and increased their vulnerability
through harmful outcomes of urban planning. Huang’s treatment focuses on responses
of the indigenous communities to disaster-driven migration/urbanisation through theories
Douglass and Miller 281
of community resilience. It expands the scope of ‘disasters’ by showing how they were
incubated by state-driven relocation projects that greatly contributed to the vulnerability
of the indigenous communities under climate change.
Pablo Figueroa provides an in-depth study of Japan’s March 2011 triple disaster that
witnessed a massive undersea earthquake producing an epochal tsunami that had the further
effect of initiating a nuclear power plant meltdown. Several years after these events, recovery
remains unsure and socially and politically contentious. It has also provoked national anti-
nuclear protests and local government reforms. In using physical reconstruction as the
principal means for recovery, national government responses have tended to be the same
as in the past, however. It has also attempted to promote appearances of rapid recovery by
segregating nuclear refugees from view by removing them from the area to accomplish what
Figueroa calls ‘state invisibilization’ of disaster victims. Local residents and governments are
confronted with fait accompli decisions in which they have had only modest involvement.
Astonishingly, this has all taken place without an articulate consideration of disaster justice.
In their study of Disaster Risk in the Darjeeling-Sikkim Himalayas, Andy Rumbach and
Jeremy Nemeth write about the ways in which physical expansion of small cities in West
Bengal experience environmental decline with heightened disaster risks through government
projects to widen roads to accommodate growing traffic. Added to this is the construction of
numerous taller concrete buildings that increase chances of disastrous consequences of
earthquakes and monsoonal rains that routinely occur. These projects are also intended
to accommodate hoped-for increases in tourism to the area. The authors assess these
worsening disaster-prone circumstances from a political economy perspective of ‘disaster
risk creation’ that is imbedded in fractured planning administration, short-term over long-
term orientations, clientelism, and petty corruption.
Philip Drake brings our attention to one of the most well-known disasters in recent years
in Southeast Asia that has become known as the Lapindo (a.k.a. Lusi) mud volcano in
Sidoarjo, East Java, that began in 2006 and continues to the present. This event focuses
on a single corporation that, in this case, is the suspected source of the sudden flow of hot
mud from underground volcano that soon submerged entire villages and permanently
displaced 40,000 people while incurring over $2.7 billion in damages. It exhibits a classic
instance of disaster justice contestations in that explanations of the disaster differ according
to the key stakeholders. For the Lapindo Brantas company, the cause is purely an act of
nature triggered by an earthquake. To victims and their supporters, the disaster resulted
from mismanaged deep fracking for oil by the company. The size of the disaster further
compelled government participation in efforts to reach agreement on monetary
compensation to the victims. Of interest, too, is how science has been used by all sides to
provide evidence of causal factors, which are used to inform legal challenges as well
(Nuwersept, 2015).
From these challenges, the push for disaster justice in Sidoarjo has reached back into
history of injustices that predate the mud eruption to create a larger scale of disaster justice
politics about power and government. Such longer term analysis makes important
contributions to conceptualising critical justice politics much in the same way as other
contributions to this special edition have done, which is to reveal layers of social
vulnerabilities that already exist at the moment that a disaster occurs. As Drake nicely
phrases it, by ‘ungluing justice politics’ from a specific disastrous event, we can then
better reveal the constellations of social and historical processes that cumulatively lead to
the outcry in responding to the injustice of that event.
Fiona Williamson, a disaster historian, investigates the preconditions and consequences of
floods that took place in Singapore in 1954 when it was still under colonial rule and the
282 Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1(3)
kampong culture of self-help was prominent. Drawing from the situation facing residents of
rural districts of Singapore following the 1954 floods, Williamson investigates the options
available to marginalised communities for self-help and governmental aid during and after
the flood. She elucidates how politicians used disaster justice as a political platform. She
finds that low expectations of government and deep-rooted cultural affinity for community
self-management led to preferences for private and informal types of post-disaster aid over
government avenues. Williamson further argues that the moral claims of leading community
members were enhanced by the intense peaks of social disruption created by disaster, leading
them to access the same political arenas from which they were formally excluded.
Drawing from a study in a low-income area in Mumbai that is chronically flooded during
monsoon seasons, D. Parthasarathy discusses disaster justice in terms of the compounding
effects generating long-term uncertainty. The uncertainties in the aftermath of a flood are
manifold, including those related to the implementation of resettlement programmes,
entitlements to land and to urban citizenship rights, poor waste management, and many
more routines of assistance from government. These uncertainties, which are unevenly
experienced among settlements, cumulatively disempower flood victims from participating
in recovery and perpetuate debilitating trauma about what courses of action can be pursued.
Moreover, solutions in one area, such as building flood walls, worsen conditions in others as
they impact not only water flows, livelihoods, health, and well-being. Such compounding
conditions generate a state of crisis every monsoon. With these understandings, prevailing
depoliticised ideas of resilience and ‘bouncing back’ from a disaster need to be rethought in
terms of structural forces and social dynamics that reproduce situations in which poorer
disaster victims and their localities remain invisible in all manner of public policy
deliberations and decisions.
Conclusions
Our central premise in bringing this collection together is that disaster justice as a moral
claim on governance arises from anthropogenic interventions in nature that incubate
disasters and magnify their socially and spatially uneven impacts. Posing disaster justice
as a problem of governance thus covers a set of issues that encompass, but are also
differentiated from, such allied concepts as environmental and climate justice. As intense
events that cause widespread harm and overwhelm existing capacities to respond, disasters
generate highly charged but exceptionally complex questions of justice. These factors
combined with the multiple compound effects of environmental disasters that further
complicate questions of justice in establishing causalities, attributing blame, identifying
victims, and (re-)establishing working solutions.
Following from this premise, the conceptualisations of disaster justice and grounded
studies in this special issue seek to open discussion about (in)justice to multiple sectors
and academic disciplines with a view to incorporating approaches that extend well beyond
a disaster event. By viewing disaster justice in this way, from longitudinal and multi-scalar
perspectives, our authors treat the underlying patterns of social inequity and vulnerability
before a disaster as an optic through which to reflect on claims to injustice in the immediate
aftermath of a crisis and in longer processes of rehabilitation and building resilience to future
crises. Our approach includes attention to procedural justice as a question of who is included
in the public sphere of decision-making before, during, and after a disaster. All of these three
dimensions further necessitate longitudinal, multi-scalar, and interdisciplinary research.
From a macro perspective, Asia’s accelerated urban transition brings studies of
environmental disasters into conversation with broader processes of planetary urbanisation
Douglass and Miller 283
to expose the ways in which anthropogenic and natural events interplay to add to socially and
spatially uneven sources and consequences of environmental disasters. While cities are
simultaneously primary sources of the Anthropocene and sites of major environmental
disasters, they also expand their reach to incorporate rural and remote regions into an
urban matrix of decision-making power and flows of people, resources, and knowledge that
magnify disaster risks and vulnerabilities across geographical space and through time.
Whether in cities or world peripheries, awareness of our planetary interconnectedness is
growing, and, along with it, calls for disaster justice are appearing from local to global scales.
As a relatively new concept that seeks to inform scholarship and real world practices,
disaster justice necessarily requires linkages with critical thinking across disciplines with
actionable knowledge and diversified policy options. Disaster governance is too complex
to be deciphered by a single discipline. Yet critical scholarship remains in disciplinary
journals and silos in the social sciences and humanities, while a substantial amount of
policymaking and practice continues to be informed by a very narrow band of academic
disciplines (Rao and Woolcock, 2007). Meanwhile, cooperative inter-city networks of mainly
urban-based disaster recovery and humanitarian assistance organisations and programmes
are furthering acceptance of the principle that people everywhere are entitled to be engaged
in governance to reduce vulnerabilities and equally share in disaster relief assistance. Cities
across Asia are also emerging as sites of innovation in promoting more inclusive forms of
participatory governance through wider circles of civic engagement that assert rights-based
strategies in building resilience for more socially just post-disaster futures. Multidisciplinary
scholarship is brought together here with the hope to contribute to bridging gaps in the
academy and with on-the-ground efforts to achieve disaster justice.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article: The research benefited from the financial support of a Singapore Ministry of
Education Academic Research Fund Tier 2 grant entitled ‘Governing Compound Disasters in
Urbanising Asia’ (MOE2014-T2-1-017).
Notes
1. While some scientists identify the beginning of the Anthropocene with the Great Acceleration of
industrial revolution around 1750, or even earlier, the steep increases in carbon emissions
accelerating global climate change are dated from the 1950s (Ellis, 2013; Phys.Org, 2016).
2. In finding that climate change is accelerating, recent assessments conclude that it is already
changing too fast for many plant and animal species to adapt, and they thus face extinction
(Briggs, 2016).
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