Explaining Everything Explains Nothing: The Problem of Defining Disaster Management

The extreme nature of disasters demands immediate and often prolonged attention. Yet the academic understanding of how these events are best managed, especially in the context of public policy and administration, is in its infancy. The very definition of disaster management – ‘preparation for, mitigation of, response to, and recovery from emergencies and disasters’ – encapsulates so many actions that it seems to exclude nothing. Such a lack of specificity has negative consequences for disaster management study, policy, and practice. This problem can be remedied by conceptualizing disaster management as the anticipation of those adverse events that transcend expected emergencies, by rooting it in the discipline of public administration, and by promoting its normative understanding of the broader political context.

Johanu Botha is a PhD student in SPPA.