Presentation short abstract

Achieving sustainable development has been increasingly understood as an outcome not only of economic and social policies but also the ability to manage disaster-related risks. We explore how incorporating multiple values into social designs reduce the impact of disasters and promote development.

Presentation long abstract

In a rapidly changing world, the ability to manage disaster-related risks is central to achieving sustainable development. While climate change and biodiversity loss are creating conditions of complexity and uncertainty, current knowledge systems, practices, and policies remain highly specialized and fragmented, and are increasingly not sufficient to meet these challenges. Linear understandings of top-down, fragmented, technical responses to disasters and development reflect a set of narrow understandings of why disasters occur and how we should respond to them. However, there has been growing policy attention to the importance of examining how values shape policies. A growing literature emphasizes that values that conceive of humanity as part of nature are central to addressing the formidable climatic, biophysical and socio-economic challenges humanity currently faces. In this presentation, we employ World Ecology as the framework that acknowledges peoples’ various relations with nature, and view “region” as a space of humanity-in-nature relations where multiple places contain different relations between nature, society, and humanity. Particularly, in East Asia, flows of trade, investment, and aid have reworked humanity-in-nature relations, creating growing risks and vulnerabilities of disasters. Through a lens of World Ecology, we critically rethink the relationship between disasters and development, and explore the ways in which multiple values could be integrated into policies and governance of development, environment, and disasters through shifting knowledge systems, worldviews and values on humanity-in-nature relations.