Abstract
In this article, disasters are understood as processes that have different impacts on social routines in terms of scale, scope and duration. The extent of adaptive processes in society can provide the ground for a rough classification of disaster types. Such classification has, on the one hand, practical and analytical advantages. On the other hand, they harbour the danger of overlooking transitions of scale and discourage comprehensive scale-related learning forms. Based on the disaster scale by Fischer (Int J Mass Emerg Disasters 1:91–107, 2003), flash floods in mountain rivers and torrents are described as extreme emergencies or small-town disasters. Three given examples will clearly show that learning rarely takes place within an institutional setting that is subjected to small disasters, because the stakeholder’s focus remains on only one level. Therefore, we propose to implement a system of self-organised and scale-independent learning, so called deutero learning, within the political subsystem. Following a damaging event, participative processes that involve all levels should be initialised. Their task would be to assess the combination of causes and draw conclusions for mitigation measures. An aggregation of these assessments would help the responsible political subsystems to adapt the current natural disasters policy to the changing environmental conditions.
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Notes
For example, the report for the White House (2006) analyses only the federal response to hurricane Katrina: “While the Report notes that disaster preparedness and response to most incidents remains a State and local responsibility, this review did not include an assessment of State and local responses”. The connection between emergency management and hazard mitigation is not addressed, either.
Discursive approaches on “risk governance” try to overcome these simplifications and its unwanted side-effects, at least the “root-causes” of disasters. The IRGC-Framework (Renn and Walker 2008) for example offers practice orientated guidelines to understand risks in their broader connectedness and contexts. The approach developed in this article can be seen as a supplementation to these approaches by focusing on underlying cognitive, social and material factors and their interconnections and interactions in the context of disasters.
The spatial planning authorities have, for many years, played a minor role in flood management. The basic concept for flood management in Germany was developed by the watershed authorities (LAWA 1995). Additionally, the strictest legal norm—the declaration of flood zones which induces a building ban—is regulated in the German Water Act (Wasserhaushaltsgesetz).
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Voss, M., Wagner, K. Learning from (small) disasters. Nat Hazards 55, 657–669 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-010-9498-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-010-9498-5