As Tacloban city struggles six years after being devastated by Typhoon Yolanda, a call to transform current development and recovery models.
Transforming development and disaster risk
Development is vital for reducing disaster risk, yet current unsustainable development models are driving and creating disaster risks, for example, in the removal of natural storm-surge protection barriers including mangrove forests in favour of aquaculture farms or beachfront properties. At the same time, disasters can destroy development gains, but existing disaster risk reduction (DRR) approaches are not sufficiently contributing to sustainable development. Transformation is increasingly understood and considered as a legitimate and necessary pathway for moving from current development patterns that increase, create or unfairly distribute risks, towards more equitable, resilient and sustainable development.
TDDR considers transformation as the altering of fundamental attributes of linked development-DRR systems, primarily through challenging existing governance arrangements, institutions, power paradigms, social values, and techno-centric practices. Transformation is increasingly seen as necessary because the macro-level status quo is not sufficiently equipped to address the environment and development, and climate and disaster risk challenges facing the planet. Initiating and facilitating transformative processes requires adaptive governance, learning, innovation, and leadership.
Since 2015, the SEI Initiative on Transforming Development and Disaster Risk (TDDR) has been working to advance scientific knowledge and support policy and practice to enact transformations towards more equitable, resilient and sustainable societies. TDDR develops, refines and communicates insights and approaches on how to transform the relationship between development and disaster risk, from one where risks are socially and politically created within development processes, to one where sustainable development and DRR work in unison to address the root causes of risk. Our focus on transformation highlights the need for systemic change to social systems that create and perpetuate risk, and lead to socially unjust and unsustainable development outcomes.
The central goal of TDDR is aligned with both the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction; two major international frameworks adopted in 2015. Our work is also motivated by the 2012 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX), the 2015 Global Assessment Report on DRR which called for transformative practices to manage risks inside development, and the recent 2018 UN high-level political forum which had the theme ‘transformation towards sustainable and resilient societies’.
In exploring these concepts and themes, we have developed and framed principles and approaches to support our vision of transforming development and disaster risk. We identify trade-offs in decision-making, equitable resilience, and adaptive governance as approaches with transformative potential within the TDDR framework, shown below. We have tested these approaches in post-disaster recovery contexts in Tacloban, Philippines following Typhoon Yolanda/Haiyan, and in flood affected and climate vulnerable Bangladesh.
We have developed and tested a typology framework of trade-offs that can be used to expose the risks and benefits of decisions related to development and DRR, specifically interrogating participation, equity, timescale, risks, and aggregate dimensions of trade-offs. Our work on equitable resilience has also conceptualized and empirically tested the transformative potential of subjecting resilience to equity considerations to expose how levers of power define different outcomes. We have also identified how adaptive governance can lead to transformative outcomes for DRR by looking at the components of the Sendai Framework.
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