The Commitment to Disaster Risk Reduction as a Bridge between Humanitarian Aid and Sustainable Development
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12496 |
| Published date | 01 November 2017 |
| Date | 01 November 2017 |
The Commitment to Disaster Risk Reduction as
a Bridge between Humanitarian Aid and
Sustainable Development
Francesca Pusterla
SOAS, University of London
Humanitarian Crises, Intervention and Security: A Frame-
work for Evidence-Based Programming by Liesbet Heyse,
Andrej Zwitter, Rafael Wittek, and Joost Herman (eds). Lon-
don and New York: Routledge Studies in Intervention and
Statebuilding, 2015. 238 pp., £110 hardcover 978-0-415-
83039-3, £30.99 paperback 978-1-138-23662-2
Theories of Sustainable Development by Judith C.
Enders, and Moritz Remig (eds). London and New York:
Routledge, 2015. 212 pp., £110 hardcover 978-1-138-79636-
2, £36.99 paperback 978-0-415-39025-5
Faced with the complexity of our times, interventions in
humanitarian aid and sustainable development need to be
rethought in what pertains to their approaches to disaster
risk reduction and the support of fragile geographical areas
and populations. Humanitarian Crises, Intervention and Secu-
rity (HCIS) and Theories of Sustainable Development (TSD) are
two edited books that commendably help to build a bridge
between all the economic, social, political and cultural facets
of humanitarian aid and sustainable development. With a
common interdisciplinary approach, both books advance the
necessity of disaster risk reduction and link crisis prevention
with humanitarian relief, rehabilitation, and development.
The volume edited by Heyse et al. (HCIS) explains how
humanitarian crises are not sudden, but the consequence of
highly vulnerable contexts and the exposing of ‘people to
(disruptions in) their environment’(HCIS, p. 13) due to lack
of preparedness, prevention and resilience. Enders and
Remig’s edited volume (TSD) affirms the importance of a
theoretical discussion on sustainability and of strong cooper-
ation between the natural and social sciences in order to
face the problem of collective action and governance (TSD,
p.1). The premises of these books lead sustainable develop-
ment and humanitarian aid to converge on the shared logic
that highly uncertain and urgent contexts of intervention in
crises require an effort to ‘improve the understanding of
environment-society relations’(TSD, pp.48–49), as well as
flexibility and transdisciplinarity. Both books make a compa-
rable contribution to the debates on environmental and
humanitarian vulnerability and disaster risk reduction.
HCIS has the twofold goal of analysing the recent devel-
opments in the professionalisation of the humanitarian aid
sector and conceptualising an innovative intervention
scheme, or the Humanitarian Analysis and Intervention
Design Framework (H-AID). The book’s structure wisely
alternates critical arguments and suggestions for improve-
ment, and three main interesting points can be raised in
order to convey the general meaning of the book. The first
point is covered by chapters 1 to 5 and concerns the
authors’attempts to provide a theoretical and methodologi-
cal discussion about the necessity of knowing and under-
standing the existing frameworks for the humanitarian aid
analysis. Moreover, they also propose a new model able to
overcome the current methodological drawbacks and to
account for the complexity and specificity of the humanitar-
ian crisis contexts in which it is required to intervene. The
book thus first displays the main obstacles to the implemen-
tation of humanitarian aid projects and stresses improve-
ments that are indispensable for the effective design and
implementation of humanitarian interventions. Indeed, there
is a strong need to improve the information collection, con-
text analysis, coherence and comprehensiveness of
approaches, attention to disaster risk reduction, and linking
of relief, rehabilitation and development (HCIS, pp. 1–5, 12–
13). To this end, the book proposes an original framework
for the analysis of humanitarian crisis contexts, namely the
H-AID framework. Following a preliminary discussion on
methodological issues, six dimensions are determined in
order to provide a general but detailed overview of any
humanitarian crisis context: environment, health, politics,
economics, socio-cultural aspects, and food (HCIS pp. 33–34).
The second part of the book elaborates more on each of
these six dimensions. For example, it stresses that a good
knowledge of the political context in which a crisis occurs is
indispensable in order to plan an effective intervention (HCIS
pp. 63–65). Also, the economic situation before, during and
after a crisis at the local, regional, and national level must
be seriously analysed (HCIS p. 70). Nor can societal security
be neglected given that a crisis can also jeopardise the
socio-cultural needs of the population (HCIS pp. 86–87). The
relation between food and health security is discussed by
investigating whether the latter can be considered as
dependent (partially or totally) on the former (HCIS pp. 108–
109). The last dimension concerns the environmental con-
text and affirms that natural disasters can be aggravated, or
even entirely provoked, by the negative human impact on
the environment (HCIS pp. 119–122).
Once the context of humanitarian crises is explained, the
third part of the book explores the original framework of
Global Policy (2017) 8:4 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12496 ©2017 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 8 . Issue 4 . November 2017 587
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