Existing research on civilian rescue teams (CRTs) has predominantly focused on their roles in and contributions to disaster governance, with comparatively limited attention paid to their own development and organisational capacity building (OCB). Strengthening OCB is essential for CRT development through the integration of internal resources and external support. Drawing on resource dependence theory and the resource-based view, this study develops an integrated theoretical framework to examine OCB in CRTs. Using descriptive statistics and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), the study analyses data from 816 teams across China through a national survey. The findings yield two key insights. First, the descriptive analysis documents substantial variation in the geographical distribution, organisational scale, and network integration of CRTs, providing the empirical context for examining their heterogeneous capacity building configurations. Second, and more significantly, the fsQCA results show that high OCB arises from configurations of internal and external resources. Some conditions are substitutable, whereas professional competence remains the core condition for absorbing and converting external resources into OCB. This research contributes to the literature on OCB in disaster management and offers practical implications for strengthening the development of CRTs.
The humanitarian sector has been challenging power relationships between international and local actors for decades, attempting to move towards a mode of operation where local knowledge and capacity are central. The sector is thus striving to promote a more inclusive approach to aid delivery through localisation. Existing literature largely focuses on power imbalances between international and local actors. However, power imbalances among local actors can also undermine localisation efforts, meaning that affected communities do not always support or benefit from a shift in power to national and local actors. In this paper, we present a most-different case comparison of the refugee response in Turkey and the Hurricane Maria response in Dominica, drawing on 110 interviews. We argue that dynamics of paternalism and politicisation among local actors in the same country can undermine localisation's goal of providing inclusive and needs-based assistance. When funders do not account for such dynamics, we posit, localisation can reinforce, rather than alleviate, inequality and marginalisation.
As nature-induced disasters intensify and reliance on volunteer support grows, volunteers are now increasingly critical to disaster response and recovery, particularly in countries like Australia. This paper advances our empirical understanding of volunteer contributions to long-term disaster recovery. The use of semi-structured interviews with volunteers who provide disaster recovery support, stakeholders who collaborate with volunteers, and individuals who received recovery support services from volunteers allowed us to identify effective approaches that resonated with and meaningfully aided disaster-affected people. To support individuals and families through the challenging and overwhelming recovery process, volunteers extended relational, compassionate, and agile support. By adopting a long-term perspective focused on housing recovery, rather than engaging in a crisis response role, volunteers were able to set and manage realistic expectations concerning service delivery. Volunteers utilised both their local connections and organisational links to collaborate and communicate, confirming the need to look at the broader context within which they operate.
This article explores how the humanitarian-development-peace (HDP) nexus (also known as the triple nexus) is operationalised, moving beyond policy discourse to implementation on the ground. Drawing on a systematic literature review, programme analysis, and field-based observation, it proposes three operational approaches to the HDP nexus, integrated, nexus-sensitive, and coordinated, which often appear in hybrid forms. Building on Paul Howe's (2019) 'bundles and arrays' framework, the typology moves the focus from individual project design to broader organisational strategies, institutional mandates, contextual realities, and trade-offs shaping nexus practice. The analysis situates this within a decade of nexus discourse and implementation, addressing current pressures such as shrinking aid budgets and the integration of climate and displacement agendas, while examining their implications for operational practice. Rather than pursuing a universal model, the paper argues that effective practice resists standardisation, emerging instead from negotiation across shifting mandates, evolving priorities, and diverse contexts, offering a typology to guide context-specific operational choices.
Rapid, reliable assessment of building damage immediately after an earthquake is essential for prioritising search and rescue, allocating scarce resources, and establishing early situational awareness. This study develops and evaluates a deep learning classifier that uses terrestrial images-which provide critical ground-level detail often missed by aerial or satellite views-to categorise buildings as not damaged, damaged, or collapsed. Trained on a curated corpus of post-event building images sourced from multiple earthquakes, a ResNet50-based model achieved 93.5 per cent overall accuracy in terms of validation. The results demonstrate the feasibility of fast, initial triage at building scale and serve to complement existing aerial/remote sensing workflows, including potential integration into crowdsourced and reconnaissance imagery streams. This approach offers a practical path to accelerating post-event decision support while recognising that finer-grained damage classification may be developed for later recovery phases, ultimately improving urban resilience and saving human lives during critical, time-sensitive operations in vulnerable, disaster-stricken communities.
Grassroots organisations (GOs) often emerge spontaneously in disaster contexts to fill gaps left by formal authorities, changing their structures and functions to meet evolving community needs. While prior research documents these transformations, it offers limited insight into why they occur and what they mean for disaster recovery. Social capital (SC) is critical for collective action, but its role in shaping grassroots organisational change remains underexplored. This study, examining community-based GOs in Taiwan following Typhoon Morakot in 2009, investigates how SC influences organisational change. Using a comparative case study design, it finds that bonding SC within communities was most closely associated with whether change was sustained. Alignment between the initiatives of GOs and community priorities mediated bonding SC, sustaining trust, reciprocity, and legitimacy. Bridging and linking SC supported access to resources and external legitimacy, but they were not sufficient on their own when local support weakened. Theoretically, the study clarifies how SC subtypes interact with organisational change and helps interpret what such changes signify. Practically, it underscores the importance of responsive community engagement while strategically leveraging bridging and linking SC in post-disaster recovery.
This study critically examines post-disaster recovery policies in Brazil and their short- and long-term effects on marginalised populations, particularly those living in informal or precarious housing. Drawing on a mixed-methods investigation conducted in collaboration with the Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens, the research analyses multi-site and multi-temporal climate-related disasters in Petrópolis (2011, 2022, 2024) and São Sebastião (2023). Through interviews, surveys, spatial analyses, and participatory timelines, it contrasts institutional recovery narratives with the lived experiences of disaster-affected communities. The findings demonstrate that dominant recovery frameworks-centred on rental subsidies and social housing-frequently reproduce displacement, exclusion, and renewed vulnerability. By prioritising the rapid provision of a 'roof' over community continuity, cultural adequacy, and territorial ties, these policies often generate post-disaster deterritorialisation. The study argues for redress-based recovery approaches that reconceptualise recovery not as a discrete policy stage, but as part of an ongoing transformative and context-sensitive disaster risk reduction project.
Despite a growing body of literature linking transnational sex and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) among women across Sub-Saharan Africa, knowledge gaps remain regarding the environmental or climate-related drivers of these phenomena. This study is the first to examine potential links between landslides, survival sex, and women's reproductive health. It does so by drawing on interviews with community members that focus on understanding the response strategies frequently undertaken by women in Bududa, Uganda, a rural, disaster-prone district. The interviews reveal that community members perceive women to be especially vulnerable after a landslide owing to their gendered roles and positions. Additionally, the overwhelming majority of the interviews established explicit connections between landslides, transactional sex, and consequences like HIV. This research provides a nuanced investigation of how survival sex is associated with gendered expectations and inequalities that become intensified in the wake of devastating events like landslides. The interviews exposed key mechanisms surrounding these relationships, including hunger, homelessness, and violence.
Local women's organisations assume essential roles during disasters in hazard-prone, rural poor communities, especially when government capacities are overwhelmed and non-government resources are required to meet affected people's needs. Yet, they are often deprioritised as international actors' partners of choice in the well-established humanitarian system of the Philippines. This paper illustrates how they navigate vertical social ties with international humanitarian organisations to enhance their resilience in disaster preparedness, response, and recovery. It examines whether strengthening the linking social capital of local women's organisations with international humanitarian non-governmental organisations can: improve women's ability to access resources in disasters; challenge the power dynamic in such a way that women are able to engage meaningfully in decision making and attain an equal footing in the partnership; and increase the capacity of women to build community resilience as an outcome of improved access and meaningful engagement. The study engaged 10 leaders of the National Rural Women's Coalition (PKKK) in semi-structured interviews and applied a social constructionist, feminist standpoint framework to the analysis. It found that rural women navigate asymmetrical power dynamics in creative ways and value partnership behaviours that demonstrate equitability and true accompaniment.
This article examines the preparedness of emergency management (EM) for addressing questions pertaining to artificial intelligence (AI), encompassing its benefits to EM missions, the potential biases, the societal impacts, and more. We pinpoint two key shortcomings in early EM research on AI: (i) insufficient discussion of both AI's history and evolution; and (ii) a lack of frameworks for organising AI-related knowledge-building efforts. We offer a comprehensive survey of AI that is tailored for EM scholars and practitioners. Then, utilising the case of cyberspace and domain concept development, we explore the challenges of applying legacy ideas to disruptive technologies. We argue that current EM frameworks struggle to align with emerging technologies; as a result, we propose a new framework that bridges EM-specific concerns and broader social science inquiries and AI. This framework aims to facilitate research and practical efforts to navigate the complexities of AI technology within the context of EM.
This study investigates the claim that women are disproportionately more likely to die in disasters by reviewing existing data sources and compiling new datasets on sex-differentiated disaster fatalities in the twenty-first century. The analysis is structured by disaster type, covering geophysical, meteorological, climatological, hydrological, and biological hazards, as well as broader national-level patterns based on global databases. It examines high-impact events across these disaster types and validates sex-disaggregated fatality patterns by integrating and assessing multiple data sources and demographic proxies. The findings do not support the widely cited claim of consistently higher female mortality. Instead, sex-disaggregated data remain very limited, and the evidence is largely inconclusive, except for biological disasters where male fatalities are consistently higher. Rather than assuming disproportionate effects in advance, sex-specific patterns should be assessed empirically. The study recommends mandatory, systematic reporting of gender-disaggregated fatalities and greater attention to differences in gender-based vulnerabilities across disaster types and contexts.
This article explores the role of social capital in wildfire resilience and is based on case study research in central Portugal. Given the recent revival of the concept across disciplines to explain how communities can cope with hazards, we critically analyse social capital through a social network analysis perspective, introducing an innovative methodological approach. By focusing on the socio-cultural structures that influence preventive and recovery capacities, two rural communities were assessed and compared to understand the conditions under which social networks operate. The results confirm the importance of bridging and linking ties but reveal the need for shared collective norms and values to sustain preparedness and recovery initiatives, especially when institutional risk management systems fail. We argue that the context in which social capital is activated reflects the socio-political dimensions of wildfires and sheds light on the overlooked efforts of rural communities to resist their relegated status as second-class citizens.
Our understanding of the effects of multi-hazard contexts on risk perception and behaviour is limited. In a novel approach, we utilise an experimental survey where groups of participants are asked to consider a different combination of the same two hazards: an earthquake and a tsunami. We discovered that asking people about one hazard has significant and meaningful effects on their judgements of the second hazard. In particular, participants perceived significantly less threat from a tsunami after thinking about an earthquake, and vice versa. Intention to prepare for a tsunami was also lower if the participants had already been asked about an earthquake; however, intention to prepare for an earthquake was higher if participants had already been asked about a tsunami. These findings have important implications for public education efforts, suggesting that it may be better to focus on encouraging preparation for a single hazard or for impacts separate from a specific causal hazard, rather than overloading the public with multiple risks simultaneously.
Malawi's exposure to climate-induced extremes reveals gaps in loss and damage (L&D) governance, especially with respect to non-economic losses that lie outside of standard post-disaster accounts. Drawing on household loss inventories, participatory mapping, geospatial analysis, and community consultations in the districts of Nsanje and Zomba, this study develops and tests an operational L&D programming framework. The framework organises community-reported economic and non-economic losses, coded for salience, severity, persistence, and reversibility, into a theme-by-site matrix linked to geospatial hazard footprints. It then links this evidence to attribution and finance cues that clarify when climate finance, disaster risk reduction, or humanitarian instruments are most appropriate. The results show systematic undervaluation of non-economic loss, spatially clustered burdens, and finance needs that exceed current pilot initiatives. Centred on Malawi in southeast Africa yet designed for wider adaptation, the framework offers a transferable model for climate vulnerable countries seeking credible and equitable L&D governance.
This study explores how disaster-impacted communities in New South Wales, Australia, mobilised during and after the bushfire crisis of 2019-20 and multiple catastrophic floods between 2020 and 2022. Interviews were conducted across three regions: Northern Rivers; Blue Mountains; and Hawkesbury. Our findings illuminate how community-led actions are driven by a broad range of 'local knowledges', based in and organised through long-standing networks and organisations. Supporting existing research, we illustrate why the 'spontaneous' label, which fuels negative perceptions of chaos and risk, remains inadequate for such organising. Furthermore, and crucially, we clarify the role and scope of 'local knowledges' and how they, and the networks in which they are embedded, refine an understanding of 'social infrastructure'. We argue that community knowledges and networks should be seen as essential for cross-sectoral disaster management and adaptation planning. Alongside the communities engaged, we advocate for their formal recognition and structural integration to reduce future disaster risk.
Colombia's response to Venezuelan displacement-driven by economic collapse, political instability, and humanitarian need-through the Temporary Protection Status programme has been praised internationally for its inclusive approach and positive effects on both migrants and host countries. This research argues that the adoption of a crisis lens is the key to understanding how such an effective response was possible. Based on 40 semi-structured interviews with policymakers and experts, as well as a review of literature on internal forced displacement policy, this article highlights how Colombia leveraged institutional legacies from its internal conflict and displacement crises to shape its response. The findings identify five capacities that were transferred across crises: management of international aid; coordination among institutions; population registration; integration of external models; and understanding of the nature of the border. The article contributes to the literature on large-scale displacement by emphasising the importance of institutional memory in shaping responses and suggests the presence of a 'vulnerability paradox': how countries with histories of adversity can build resilience and crisis management capacities.
This article explores longstanding conflict between Turkana and Pokot pastoralist communities in northern Kenya, close to the country's border with Uganda. Conflict in this region has consistently defied interventions by both governments and development organisations. While numerous studies have emphasised the worsening situation, often in relation to climate change and ensuing forms of resource scarcity, few have illuminated the intricate connections between the commercialisation of livestock theft and other forms of politically motivated, territorial resource-based violence. To address this gap in existing analyses of conflict in the pastoral borderlands, the article draws on four years of fieldwork, employing mixed-method approaches, including participatory community videos, to understand the dynamics of conflict. By situating shifting patterns of violence within the context of northern Kenya's reconfiguration as a frontier of anticipation, the article underscores the complexity and the multidimensional nature of this violence, arguing that solutions must be more attuned to the evolving realities of the borderlands.
In the Inner Niger Delta, socio-spatial transformations have profoundly reshaped relationships between communities and natural resources, intensifying tensions around access and management. In this context, local conventions (LCs) have emerged as essential instruments of social and environmental regulation in response to resource degradation, climate variability, competition over land, water, and pastures, and persistent insecurity. This study investigates the role of LCs in enhancing natural resource governance and peacebuilding. Using qualitative methods, the research involved 7 focus-group discussions and 11 interviews across three communes in the Mopti Region, Mali. The findings highlight how LCs, developed through a participatory and inclusive process anchored in Mali's decentralisation legal framework, facilitate dialogue among diverse stakeholders and establish negotiated rules for access to and use of natural resources, thereby reducing tensions over resource use and clarifying the rights and responsibilities of different user groups. Yet, challenges remain, such as dependence on external funding and insufficient local capacities. LCs emerge as vital tools for mitigating conflicts in natural resource management and promoting inclusive governance. Their sustainability depends on strengthening local ownership and capacities while integrating more equitable institutional frameworks to ensure their long-term effectiveness.
The construction of bandals (bamboo walls) is a widely practised climate adaptation initiative in Bangladesh, embodying community agency. This article interrogates how it can also represent locally-led maladaptation-adaptive efforts that inadvertently sustain or exacerbate the very risks they seek to address. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a riparian community, this photo essay examines our initial misinterpretation of a bandal project as successful locally-led adaptation, and our subsequent reinterpretation of it as a configuration of three interrelated forms of responsibility: 'self-responsibility', wherein at-risk communities act under constraint; 'passive responsibility', manifested through fragmented expert and institutional knowledge; and 'reactive responsibility', embedded in public resource distribution patterns reflecting a logic of impact-triggered humanitarian aid that constrains adaptive potential. We argue that, in the absence of active and proactive responsibilities assumed by a range of local actors, self-responsibility is coerced, responsibilising at-risk people and producing maladaptation. Locally-led adaptation, therefore, ought to move beyond a solely community-based framing towards a collectively accountable process.
Environmental volatility can inflate property values even as it destroys them. To show how, this article pairs a postcolonial micro-state in the Caribbean (Sint Maarten after Hurricane Irma) with a Nordic welfare town (Grindavík in Iceland following volcanic eruptions) because they occupy the opposite ends of the governance capacity spectrum, while sharing certain similarities. Drawing on reports, media archives, 31 ethnographic interviews, and transaction data from 2015-25, it traces four mechanisms that convert danger into a 'volatility premium': distressed asset acquisition; symbolic risk branding; risk finance design; and distributive rules. In Sint Maarten, weak regulation permits private capital to aestheticise destruction and profit from speculative rebuilding, while in Grindavík, a universal state buy-out socialises loss and freezes speculation. By combining disaster capitalism, speculative urbanism, and financialisation theory with market evidence, the study argues that turning risk into real estate value is political. The findings strengthen our understanding of climate risk economies and offer practitioners the means for auditing post-crisis property policies.
