Understanding disaster (in)justice: Spatializing the production of vulnerabilities of indigenous people in Taiwan
Journal
Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
Pages
251484861877374
Date Issued
2018-05
Author(s)
Shu-Mei Huang
Abstract
Existing disaster studies scholarship tends to uncritically privilege official institutional responses to disasters over bottom-up, community-based reactions and adaptations in the longer term. Meanwhile, the state-recognized disasters mostly exclude socioeconomic and environmental contradictions that generate disasters by making people vulnerable in the first place. Discussion of disaster justice, then, is limited to the immediate state responses to understanding disasters as natural episodes, often incorporating distributive justice into its policy responses. A more spatialized understanding of disaster justice should move beyond these dual limitations—constraints in defining disasters as isolated episodes and in planning for recovery as only emergency responses—and pay attention to the socio-spatial production of risk. This approach would better attend to underlying societal vulnerabilities created through urbanization, in this case, of the indigenous peoples of Taiwan. A spatialized understanding of disaster justice guides this research to attend to both the reoccurring displacements of indigenous people from where their socioeconomic–ecological relations were embedded and the systematic production of risk that has been reinforced and exacerbated by inadequate land use planning. Based on a study of two indigenous groups in Southern Taiwan, Kucapungane and Makazayazaya, this paper explains disaster justice from the indigenous context wrought by multiple expropriations and displacements from the 1930s onwards. This paper plans to do two things: First, it will investigate bottom-up responses to a series of historical disaster-driven migration/urbanization through theories of community resilience. Secondly, it will expand understanding of “disasters” by taking into account the state-led relocation projects as human-made disasters and examine how they have contributed to the vulnerability of the indigenous communities under climate change. It will contribute to a better understanding of disaster justice that overcomes the dual limitations and opens up opportunities for alternative research and practices.
Type
journal article