Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses household level disaster risk reduction in urban Bolivia, and to what extent we can talk about a ‘roll out’ of neoliberalism in a context of autonomous adaptation.

Paper long abstract:

With increasing urbanisation and the effects of climate change, natural and man-made disasters are becoming more common in urban areas of the global south. Research and policy within disaster studies has shifted from top down capital intensive solutions to a promotion of bottom up strategies that focus on the capacity of vulnerable groups to negotiate their lives in relation to the environment (autonomous adaptation). However, this approach is criticised for depoliticising the environmental vulnerability of affected households, as adaptation is expected to occur in a political vacuum, with little state intervention. This has been labelled as a process of 'roll out' neoliberalism.

My research investigates what vulnerable households are doing to reduce their disaster risk in hazardous Bolivian communities where state intervention is minimal. This is achieved by focusing on informal housing construction and the application of the concept of the home in order to explore the multiple motivations that are articulated through the construction of the house. The research also explores local governance in relation to environmental vulnerability in order to assess whether one can talk about a 'roll out' of neoliberalism, in which the state is seeking to produce more 'autonomous' civil societies that rely more on individual actions than on coordinated institutions in the (re)production of their social lives in relation to the biophysical world (Castree and Felli 2012)