“The world is in the grip of the most severe health crisis of our time”

WHO Director-General Dr Ghebreyesus, 7^th April 2020)

The SARS-COV-2 pandemic created a serious shock and surprise to the disaster governance mechanisms in existence. Even the most advanced disaster governance systems in the world struggled to govern, respond, communicate risk and build resilience against the pandemic. Nevertheless, countries like Taiwan, New Zealand or Finland demonstrated better-established response systems integrating innovative communication or ‘bridging agents’ having the ability, capability and accessibility to communicate and facilitate between different and diverse stakeholders – community, administration, policy. By implementing an international comparison, the overall aim of the proposed project is disclosing the specifications of the disaster governance mechanisms in Switzerland, Finland and Sri Lanka and to understand the agency of professional social work practice as a bridging agent to enhance and better equip the current disaster governance architecture and mechanisms to reduce disaster risks, increase community resilience, and advocate for the most vulnerable groups of the society.

The specific objectives of the project are (a) to understand the dynamics and inter-relational aspects of disaster governance - institutional architectural, disaster communication - and how they provide an enabling or inhibiting environment for achieving effective Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR), adaptive disaster leadership and resilient communities; (b) to comprehend agency of social work and how it is manifested in different forms of engagement and positionalities in disaster governance through first hand experiences of professional social work practitioners and service users; and (c) to enhance the capacities of professional social work practitioners through co-learning and developing educational syllabus and practical frameworks on social work in disasters.

The proposed research is placed within the academic work on disaster - social work nexus that emerged as a debate since the 1970’s in various academic fields such as social work, geography, political science, sociology and hazard studies. The overall objective of the research project lies in the academic writing and literature of disaster governance and social work.

DISASTER GOVERNANCE: Disaster governance is often defined as a field of practice that demands a multi-disciplinary approach as its key components - disaster preparedness, disaster risk reduction, resilience and disaster risk communication- require an array of expert contributions (Allen 2011, Boyer-Villemaire et al. 2014, Cosens 2013, I.P.C.C. et al. 2012, Pelling 2003, Pelling 2011, Samaratunge et al. 2012, U.N.I.S.D.R. 2011). Tierney (2012) notes: “disaster governance consists of the interrelated sets of norms, organizational and institutional actors, and practices (spanning pre-disaster, trans-disaster, and post-disaster periods) that are designed to reduce the impacts and losses associated with disasters arising from natural and technological agents and from intentional acts of terrorism…” (Tierney 2012 :344).

Dunlop et al. 2020

U.N.I.S.D.R. 2005The multi-disciplinary approach was adopted by international disaster governance frameworks such as the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015 (HFA) (Aldrich 2012, Daly et al. 2017b, Daly et al. 2017a) that placed a key emphasis on the importance of community-led recovery processes and co-designed programmatic responses (U.N.I.S.D.R. 2015). The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (U.N.I.S.D.R. 2015, Wahlstrom 2017) replaced the HFA in 2015, reconfirming the importance of sharing responsibilities among diverse stakeholders -local governments, private sector, I/NGOs, and CBOs- emphasizing the need to increase the resilience of communities. Moreover, the stock taking of both frameworks revealed a number of concerns such as the lack of systematic need and vulnerability assessments and difficulties in increasing disaster resilience, especially of the most vulnerable segments of the society (Wahlstrom 2017). Resilience is understood as an active and holistic concept supporting to develop the capacity of systems –natural, human or hybrid– to experience and resist shocks while maintaining the same functions, structure, feedbacks and therefore its identity (Dominelli 2012b, Masys 2015, Surminski and Tanner 2017). Hence resilience places a high importance on investing in preparedness rather than reactive measures of response.

Dunlop et al. 2020 reveals that the onset of COVID-19 has exposed the fragile nature of disater governance policies and institutions throughout the globe. They further points to the importance of adopting the existing governance policies to better respond to the challenges brought forth by the pandemic (Pede 2020).

To achieve and improve preparedness, important measures are strongly linked to communication. Communication sits at the core in the hierarchy of disasters, “[t]his means that (a) communication or the lack of it can cause crises, and (b) when crisis threatens or occurs, communication is central to averting, containing/resolving it, and/or leading the way to restoration” (Kapur 2017) . Though, differently situated stakeholders operate within different complex communicative and discursive environments influenced and shaped by competing media, public and policy narratives (Schaffer 2000, Shenhav 2006) . In the aggravating circumstances of disasters, it is almost impossible to unravel these communicative complexities assuring that different stakeholder in different socio-political environments experience communication in the same way. However, this is most essential to efficiently and effectively govern disaster impacts and to prevent mistrust towards decision-makers and the disaster governance system in place (Stephen 2019).

SOCIAL WORK AND DISASTERS: The history of social work responding to the needs of the most vulnerable, marginalized and oppressed populations is long (Addams 1902, Zakour 1997, Siporin 1987) . By broad areas of application–e.g. social counselling; stationary social work; work with youth, physical or psychological impaired people; migrants and asylum seekers- social work secures optimum accessibility and reach to achieve its socio-ethical vision, as Staub-Bernasconi (Staub-Bernasconi 2015, Staub-Bernasconi 2018) indicates triple Mandate, that all people have the (legal) right to live a life in freedom without fear, constriction and oppression and are entitled to support and help. In the late 1970’s social work reacted to the fast-changing globalization dynamics, changing socio-political and socio-environmental realities, increasing risk normality and rise of global social injustice. The life-oriented social work concept expanded the field of social work from ‘the art of support’ towards ‘the art of life’ for all people (Böhnisch 2019, Grundwald and Thiersch 2004, Thiersch 1992) . An increasing frequency of disasters during the 1980s and 1990s brought attention to social work theorists to analyze the inter-dependencies between environmental hazards and their disproportioned more severe impacts on humans living in socio-economically disadvantaged areas (Rogge 1993, Soine 1987) . The concept of ecological or environmental social work uses a systems approach prioritizing eco-social destructions in order to understand and acknowledge the link between humans and the physical environments: “If one is threatened so is the other” (Alston et al. 2019, Coates 2003, Coates et al. 2006, Gray 2012). However, the concept neglected to enforce action and practical suggestions on how social work should be an integral part in disaster governance in order to secure the changes that are necessary to improve the well-being and resilience of humans and the environments.

Lena Dominelli (Dominelli 2012a) in her book Green Social Work. From Environmental Crises to Environmental Justice takes up the existing critique and gaps in placing the theme of environmental justice in the center of social work debates illustrating the inseparable interconnection of social and ecological aspects of human development. She clearly positions the profession as being political, refocusing the role of professionalized social workers in natural and/or human-made disasters highlighting the potentials of how social work can be integrated within Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) strategies–locally, nationally and globally. She widens this view in her recent paper (2021) on green social work in the post covid world refering to gaining new knowledge and expertise on disaster management as an essential condition for the social worker in the post covid era (Dominelli 2021, Schmitt 2020).

Nikku (Nikku 2013) notes, “… disaster management is an integral part of the 21^st century social work but unfortunately, the profession is only beginning to carve a niche to respond to disasters” (601;Alston et al. 2018, Bauwens and Naturale 2015, Harms and M 2018). Early studies on social worker practice in disasters mainly focused on the roles and functions during the rescue stage restoring survivors’ mental health (Dodds and Nuehring 1996, Dufka 1988, Seroka 1986). Later work offers practical and theoretical studies on social work response to particular disasters – Australian drought (Hazeleger et al. 2018), Australian bushfires (Du Plooy 2013), Hurricane Katrina (Bell 2010) or SARS in Singapore (Bell 2010), as well as practical recommendations and guidelines for preparedness (Rowlands 2007), and a limited number of country case studies assessing the role of social work in recent disasters (Nikku 2013, Ng 2012, Rapeli 2017, Tang and Cheung 2007). In Switzerland current research aims to understand the link between community-based DRR and community resilience and its betterment through integration of local knowledge and risk understandings (Reichel and U 2014).

Based on the evidence presented in the literature review the project identified the following research gap:

ResearchGap

The lack of sufficient in-depth empirical and comparative studies proving the agency of professional social work practice to strengthen the existing disaster governance architecture

The proposed action-oriented project will be able to close the existing gap and support ongoing international efforts to introduce community-centric disaster governance mechanisms that in its core objective corresponds with the mandate of social work as an agent “… that promotes social change, problem solving in human relationships and the empowerment and liberation of people to enhance wellbeing, it intervenes at the point where people interact with their environment using theories of human behavior and social systems as well as upholding principles of human rights and social justice” (International Federation of Social Workers 2000).

The overall aim of the project is to understand the agency of professional social work practice as a bridging agent to enhance and better equip the current disaster governance architecture and mechanisms to reduce disaster risks, increase community resilience, and advocate for the most vulnerable groups of the society in Switzerland, Finland and Sri Lanka

The research objectives are:

1. to understand the dynamics and inter-relational aspects of disaster governance - institutional architectural, disaster communication - and how they provide an enabling or inhibiting environment for achieving effective DRR, adaptive disaster leadership and resilient communities;
2. to comprehend agency of social work and how it is manifested in different forms of engagement and agency in disaster governance through the first-hand experiences of the professional social work practitioners and service users;
3. to enhance the capacities of professional social work practitioners through co-learning and developing educational syllabus and in-service training on the agency of social work in disasters.

To achieve these objectives the project asks the overall research question:

How do disaster governance strategies established under the Sendai Framework shape and influence the agency (knowledgeability, capability, positionality) of social work to intervene as a bridging agent in disaster governance- disaster communication, disaster risk reduction, and community resilience?