From rigidity traps towards reparative disaster governance and management

Despite widespread critique, the established notion of sequential disaster management phases (mitigation, preparedness, response, recovery) continues to inform a standard set of policies and practices that lock people into rigid cycles of decision-making and action. In this paper, we refer to these as “rigidity traps.” Although expressed in different ways, rigidity traps result in the overarching effect of maintaining the broader conditions that shape disasters and they, in turn, proliferate the consequent impact. Awareness of rigidity traps, and the resulting processes and outcomes, is critical to avoid such traps. However, alternative disaster governance and management approaches are also needed in order to move on from the status quo. To this end, we build on work by scholars to deploy ‘the reparative’ as an analytical lens. Specifically, a reparative approach seeks to account for the wider historical and systemic conditions that organize and structure the ways disasters unfold, the consequences they bear, and their uneven effects across different people and places. We use this framing as a foundation to expand upon what a reparative approach might look like when applied to disaster governance and management. We do so by identifying a range of rigidity traps, which is followed by suggestions for alternative reparative approaches, including perspectives on how to institutionalise such approaches. While each example is grounded in either a particular place or type of hazard, the collection has been chosen due to their simultaneous relevance to a broader range of people, places and hazards.