Theme issue introduction Nature and Space

Environment and Planning E: Nature and

Disaster justice in Asia’s Space
2018, Vol. 1(3) 271–287
urbanising Anthropocene ! The Author(s) 2018
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/2514848618797333
Mike Douglass and Michelle Ann Miller journals.sagepub.com/home/ene
National University of Singapore, Singapore

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

Disaster justice in Asia’s urban transition in the Anthropocene

Asia has the highest frequency and the greatest number of people impacted by
environmental disasters in the world. Since 1970, over six billion people have been
affected by disasters in the Asia-Pacific region, accounting for approximately 90% of the
global total (Reliefweb, 2017; UNESCAP, 2015). The intertwining of the Anthropocene and

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

of environmental justice, it is nonetheless focused on the dynamics of disasters that are

distinct and separate from environmental concerns writ large.
Second, disasters tend to generate equally large-scale compound effects that may be
exceptionally long lasting. In areas directly impacted by an environmental disaster, these
compound effects might include loss of livelihoods, housing, and the erosion or collapse of
neighbourhood relations of reciprocity and mutual help. They can also involve the loss of
entire settlements as well as the emotionally intimate loss of loved ones that call for different
types of assistance and which may take more than a generation to heal from the legacy of
social trauma. Compound disasters are thus multi-scalar in causalities and in terms of their
highly differential social and spatial impacts. Compound disaster effects can also see a
seemingly local disaster generate impacts that reach global scales. The nuclear plant
meltdown in Japan in 2011, the flooding of Bangkok in the same year, and the explosions
that destroyed a vast supply centre in Tianjin in July 2015 each had immediate impacts on
global supply chains, including manufacturing, employment, and consumer sales in many
other countries (Douglass, 2016). Today, a disaster striking a major metropolis or a centre of
critical supplies such as petroleum would have consequences that reach far beyond the
disaster site. A defining dynamic of environmental disasters that distinguishes them from
wider concerns of environmental justice is the way in which disasters have immediate
debilitating effects that, in cascading into new disasters, generate complex issues of justice
at different scales, with multiple actors, causalities, and justice claims.
Third, governments, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and international
development agencies are recognising the need to focus on disaster justice. This awareness
is being manifested by the appearance of a plethora of organisations dedicated to disaster
risk reduction, resilience, and humanitarian assistance (DI, 2016). Especially since the Indian
Ocean tsunami and undersea earthquake of December 2004, humanitarian assistance
for disasters has become routinised as an international obligation and is now a multi-
billion-dollar industry. In the case of Indonesia’s westernmost province of Aceh, which
was most heavily impacted by the tsunami, over 160,000 people lost their lives and
550,000 were displaced (Miller, 2009). Responses to this disaster brought the involvement
of over 500 NGOs to the province. As Kweifio-Okai (2014: 1) concludes, ‘the way we
respond to and prepare for crises was altered forever’ by the Aceh experience. Speaking
of this same phenomenon, Masyrafah and McKeon (2008) found that these NGOs avoided
collaborating and cooperating around a single point of contact, which in turn exacerbated
myriad complaints of injustice among Acehnese communities about uneven access to
recovery resources, unequal representation of community members in recovery
programmes, and unfair modes of compensation and aid distribution. Similar issues of
socio-economic justice have arisen in relation to the insurance and legal services that are
heavily engaged in disaster compensations and litigations (Whoriskey, 2007). These patterns
of humanitarian assistance have become well-known characteristics of disaster responses
around the world and have thus given rise to similar sorts of disaster justice claims in
relation to different types of disasters across geographically dispersed localities.
The growth of national and international obligations to provide humanitarian assistance
for disaster relief raises fundamental questions of when, why, and how the idea of justice has
come to be applied to disasters. History is replete with episodes of horrific environmental
disasters in which countless lives have been lost and societies have experienced long-lasting
impacts and even demise. Yet the idea that people affected by disasters could appeal to the
state or other entities for justice has only in recent years reached its current levels of
acceptance (Verchick, 2012). One explanation for this late acknowledgement rests on the
interpretation of history as a long process of shifting from rulers of city-states and empires
274 Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1(3)

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)

More recently, the adoption by 193 national governments of the ‘Sustainable

Development Goals’ (SDGs) under the aegis of the United Nations drew from the 2012
United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rioþ20) to give special attention
to a ‘global ethic of the singular’ for achieving SDGs in the Anthropocene. This moral call to
global action places emphasis on collective justice for environmental wrongs and calls for
punitive measures to be taken against enablers of environmental harm based on distributive
justice (Mori, 2014). The notion that SDGs should better reflect global justice ideals in the
Anthropocene has been accompanied by growing calls among low-consuming countries to
hold the world’s greatest greenhouse gas producers to account for their major role in
incubating environmental crises. Taking this framing of global ethics as constitutive
justice, the 2015 UN Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (UN, 2015) set out
to improve global humanitarian assistance in environmental crises and to establish a new
vocabulary of ‘resilience’ to stave off disastrous events through ‘strengthening disaster risk
governance’ (UNESCAP, 2017). These agreements establish platforms for disaster justice
that draw from scholarship on dynamics underlying the socio-spatial patterns and
consequences of environmental deterioration related to disasters (Reid, 2013). Scholarship
on this rapidly emerging field tends to fall into what is called ‘the vulnerability approach’
that has been advanced internationally from the 1970s (Timmerman, 1981; Weichselgartner,
2001). Spurred by research on land degradation in Nepal and other societies in the Global
South, political ecology subsequently emerged as an important epistemological contribution
to vulnerability research that focuses on power relations that generate uneven exposures to
hazards that precede disasters and persist long after they have occurred (Bhattarai, 2018;
Ranganathan and Balazs, 2015).
Scholars conducting political ecology research have made further contributions through
the pressure and release (PAR) model (Blaikie et al., 1994; Mazumdar and Paul, 2018;
Wisner et al., 2004) that offers a concise framework for tracing vulnerability from root
causes to dynamic pressures that generate unsafe conditions that become disasters when
triggered by an environment hazard such as earthquake or flooding. In this formulation,
dynamic pressures arise from social, political, and economic processes that produce unsafe
conditions that typically generate the highest vulnerabilities among marginalised and lower
income populations. Although having limitations as a comprehensive model of either social
systems or biophysical systems, the PAR approach is useful in tracking critical social
processes and, in so doing, builds upon the understanding that disasters occur in political
space (Cohen and Werker, 2008: 795).
Vulnerability as a focus of environmental movements going beyond single events has been
most visible in the United States-led environmental justice movement. Arising in highly
urbanised settings, this literature has drawn attention to two sets of issues: (1) the
geographical risks and vulnerabilities facing inner city poor and minority communities
(Cutter, 2006; Sze and London, 2008; Taylor, 2000), and (2) efforts to remediate, relocate,
and financially compensate marginalised communities impacted by various forms of
pollution and climate change effects (Allen, 2007; Mohai et al., 2009; Pezullo, 2007).
As with the PAR approach, it has included a qualitative self-assessment analysis and
indexing of socio-economic vulnerabilities. Led by Susan Cutter (Cutter et al., 2003, 2008)
and developed by others (e.g. Harris, 2010; Lin and Polsky, 2016), it has provided a
substantial amount of critical research on the preconditions for vulnerability and risk.
Verchick (2012) similarly suggests that focusing on vulnerability offers an entry point for
better understanding how systemic forces incubate structures and processes leading to
the production of what he identifies as a ‘disaster underclass’. In resonating with
the identification of ‘chronic disasters’ and ‘chronic displacement’ associated with the
Douglass and Miller 277

Anthropocene discussed previously, the identification of a disaster underclass also uncovers

the moral and political implications for socio-economically variegated urbanising societies
that are confronted by increasingly frequent and costly environmental disasters. In this
special issue, several authors take up this challenge by examining how historical and
contextual preconditions of vulnerability, marginalisation, and the inequitable exposure
to disaster risks contribute to the mobilisation of claims to disaster justice in the
aftermath of crisis.
Mobilisations to reduce the vulnerability of marginalised people and communities tend to
divide the quest for disaster justice into three dimensions: (1) the distribution of risks and
vulnerabilities to disasters; (2) procedural processes for participation in decision-making
about all aspects of disasters before, during, and after they occur; and (3) distributive
justice in the form of fair and equitable access to disaster resources (Chopra, 2017;
Satterfield et al., 2004; Walker and Burningham, 2011). While ideally these three types of
justice should be pursued together, research indicates that procedural justice is likely to
receive the least genuine attention. Despite widespread calls by international donors and
development agencies to forge local partnerships and empower communities to take
stewardship of disaster recovery programmes are widespread, responses to catastrophic
events remain predominantly centralised, expert driven, and focused on infrastructural
solutions, especially when socio-economically marginalised groups of people are
concerned (Miller and Douglass, 2016a).
Justice entails decision-making that is translatable into actions, and justice as a right is
hollow if wider processes for social inclusion with ‘just sustainability’ are not in place to
provide policymakers, activists, and communities with a vehicle through which to pursue
and protect it (Agyeman, 2010). From this understanding, United Nations findings that
democracy is in retreat around the world (Deen, 2015) strongly suggest that both
procedural and participatory justice need greater attention in environmental disaster
research (Shrader-Frechette, 2004: 55). The grounds on which claims to justice in times of
crisis must eventually find recourse through justice systems, which in turn depend on
processes of deciding which laws should prevail and who should design them. Towards
these ends, a major contribution by authors in this themed edition is their focus on the
ways in which marginalised members of societies in Asia gain voice in decision-making about
just responses to environmental threats and crises, albeit with mixed successes. The
examinations provide critical support for the position taken by the authors in this special
issue that practices related to all phases of disaster preparedness, humanitarian relief, and
long-term recovery and resilience building need to be imbedded in processes of governance,
rather than subordinated to expert-driven forms of disaster management.
Vulnerability as the outcome of multifaceted and long-term processes of marginalisation
can persist and even worsen when disasters lead to the collapse of livelihoods and severely
erode social support systems. In such cases, survivors can quickly become victims of
predatory forces when they fall beneath the radar of official accounting of post-disaster
recovery. The still-nascent literature on green criminology, otherwise known as
conservation criminology or eco-critical criminology, has made some advances towards
identifying the perpetrators of crimes that produce flows of environmental harm, but has
devoted considerably less attention to the victims of environmental disasters (Hall, 2013).
Yet Chandran’s (2016: 3) observation that ‘disasters are the ground zero for trafficking’
constitutes just one example of the ways in which disasters attract perpetrators of grave
injustices. Its gendered dimension is prominent. As the UNODC (2016) has reported,
‘destitute women, children and older family members left behind in the villages are most
at risk of exploitation’. Human trafficking in the vacuum of official authority can take on
278 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.

Disaster justice in Asia: An overview of this collection

Collectively, the essays in this special issue contribute to concepts, methodologies, and
empirical evidence on environmental disasters as a focus for social justice. In varying
ways, the authors address the five principal questions about disasters in Asia that arise
from the key arguments made in the foregoing discussion: What is the case to be made
for disaster justice as a specific type of justice concern? How do processes of urbanisation
and environmental change in the Anthropocene affect the ways in which environmental
disasters are transforming the social and geographical patterns of vulnerabilities to
disasters and their impacts? What are the relevant scales of causalities and seeking justice?
How can the compound effects of disasters be brought into disaster justice frameworks?
And, what are the disaster governance issues that need to be addressed to move calls for
justice into effective action?
In providing research on these questions, the contributions to this collection cover cities in
six countries in Asia: India, the Philippines, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, and Japan.
In illuminating the changing geographies of disaster risk and vulnerability that are
emerging in Asia, they are among the first multidisciplinary studies to raise questions
about disaster justice in non-Western settings. Each study focuses on a specific context;
together they contribute multifaceted understandings of the ways in which the precursors
to, and outcomes of, disaster events enter into political spaces as justice claims. These claims
touch upon one or more of the key dimensions of justice discussed above, namely the
anthropogenic sources of uneven risk and vulnerability in Asia’s rapidly urbanising
societies, the procedural justice of decision-making processes concerning disasters, and the
distributive justice of access to assistance that extends through cascading effects well beyond
the disastrous event.
Because reliance on the state for justice increases with urbanisation, all of the papers
interrogate the role of the nation state in bearing an onus of responsibility for disaster justice
claims and grievances. For example, the three historical papers on urbanising societies in the
Philippines, Taiwan, and Singapore examine how shifting state–society relationships have
led to diverging official interpretations of disaster justice over time, changing how colonial
and contemporary authorities have either sought to provide redress for perceived injustices
or to seize political opportunities presented by societal unrest. In the essays on primary and
secondary Indian cities, disaster justice is shown to have varying meanings that depend on
both the proximity of sections of society to encroaching environmental threats and the extent
to which the state is implicated in the incubation of disasters born from expanding urban
development processes. The papers on Japan and Indonesia show what happens when
major environmental injustices remain unattended by states and business interests over
time, incubating compound disasters with implications for the capacities of communities
to build resilience to future crises. Taken together, the contributions highlight shared
concerns in the search for effective and inclusive forms of environmental disaster
governance.
Robert R. M. Verchick, in writing on the Quest for Disaster Justice with reference to the
Indian city of Surat, sets the stage for this special issue by underscoring a principal thesis of
this collection: he declares, ‘In the Anthropocene, there is no such thing as a natural
disaster.’ In pointing towards human culpability in both causing disasters and putting
280 Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1(3)

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.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

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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