Disaster Management and Good Governance

Healthy Environment is essential part of our wellbeing.  Environmental degradation reduces the capacity of ecosystem and affected many important services to communities like food, fire food, medicines and protection from natural hazards. There is a clear need to reinforce the importance of environmental concerns in the entire disaster management cycle of prevention, preparedness, assessment, mitigation and response and to integrate environmental concerns into planning for relief,. In this context role of Good Governance are very important. As defined by UNDP; Governance is the exercise of political, economic and administrative authority in the management of a country’s affairs at all levels. It comprises mechanisms, processes and institutions through which citizens and groups articulate their interests, exercise their legal rights, meet their obligations and mediate their differences. Government encompasses all relevant groups, including the private sector and civil society organizations. The key to efficient disaster management is the initial public awareness to recognize and address risk, supplemented with the political will to set policy and allocate appropriate resources. Equally critical is the need for sufficient managerial and coordination capacity to manage and integrate the efforts of relevant sectors and account for vulnerable and poor communities. Such capacity is dependent on the human, social, physical, economic and environmental capital of a society. The principles of good governance include broad participation, transparency, accountability, efficiency and responsiveness. All are as important for Disaster Risk Management as they are for development at large. Systematic integration of Disaster Risk Reduction into the development spheres should be the concern of the government and an integral part of good governance. Overall though, disaster governance research is less concerned with investigating the effects—both positive and negative—of governance or how to truly transform existing risk management structures. Instead, most research remains at an abstract level. Although conceptual studies regarding the characteristics of disaster governance are a fundamental necessity, research needs to offer more empirically-based evidence on the risk reducing effects of governance. The promises as well as the limits of disaster governance require more scientific scrutiny. Otherwise, justifying a fundamental shift of risk management structures from government to governance systems remains a challenge.

Keywords:
Environment degradation, Disaster Risk Management, Good governance, Traditional knowledge, Sendai Framework, Disaster Management Act, 2005