Disaster justice in Asia's urbanising Anthropocene. (September 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Douglass, Mike; Miller, Michelle Ann
• Editors: Miller, MA; Douglass, M
• Is Part Of: Environment and planning. Volume 1:Number 3(2018)
• Page Start: 271
• Page End: 287
• Publication Date: 2018-09
• Subjects: Anthropocene -- Asia -- disaster justice -- governance -- urbanisation; Political ecology -- Periodicals; Human ecology -- Periodicals; Environmental justice -- Periodicals; 304.2
• DOI: 10.1177/2514848618797333
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2514-8486

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.