Vulnerability assessments, identity and spatial scale challenges in disaster-risk reduction

Jàmbá: Journal of Disaster Risk Studies; Vol 7, No 1 (2015). doi: 10.4102/jamba.v7i1.201:

This article deals with the issue of applying generalised, a priori determinants of vulnerability to particular hazards in particular places, an approach which suffers from attribution problems that become more acute as the level of analysis is localised and the population under investigation experiences greater vulnerability. The authors locate the source of the problem in a spatial scale mismatch between the essentialist framings of identity behind these generalised determinants of vulnerability and the intersectional, situational character of identity in the places where DRR interventions are designed and implemented.

Using the Livelihoods as Intimate Government (LIG) approach to identify and understand different vulnerabilities to flooding in a community in southern Zambia, the authors empirically demonstrate how essentialist framings of identity produce this mismatch. Further, they illustrate a means of operationalising intersectional, situational framings of identity to achieve greater and more productive understandings of hazard vulnerability than available through the application of general determinants of vulnerability to specific places and cases.