Approaches to ‘vulnerability’ in eight European disaster management systems

Abstract

While social vulnerability in the face of disasters has received increasing academic attention, relatively little is known about the extent to which that knowledge is reflected in practice by institutions involved in disaster management. This study charts the practitioners' approaches to disaster vulnerability in eight European countries: Belgium; Estonia; Finland; Germany; Hungary; Italy; Norway; and Sweden. It draws on a comparative document analysis and 95 interviews with disaster managers and reveals significant differences across countries in terms of the ontology of vulnerability, its sources, reduction strategies, and the allocation of related duties. To advance the debate and provide conceptual clarity, we put forward a heuristic model to facilitate different understandings of vulnerability along the dimensions of human agency and technological structures as well as social support through private relations and state actors. This could guide risk analysis of and planning for major hazards and could be adapted further to particular types of disasters.

Resilience in care organisations: challenges in maintaining support for vulnerable people in Europe during the Covid‐19 pandemic

“…This resembles the core of the definition of resilience that we apply in the present study: the capacity to adapt to internal and external errors by changing the mode of operations, without losing the ability to function (Barabási and Pósfai, 2016, p. 303). At the same time, however, our results confirm the lack of consideration of social vulnerabilities in risk assessments and crisis planning to support those who have fallen into a vulnerable situation or seen one aggravated due to the crisis (Orru et al, 2021), including among care organisations in European countries.…”

“…The pandemic revealed the structural inequalities that exist within welfare systems towards certain population groups, which aggravate the situation of those who are already vulnerable. For instance, the migrants' inhibited access to basic emergency services demonstrates the lack of consideration of social vulnerabilities in crisis planning in many of the European countries reviewed in existing studies (see, for instance, Orru et al, 2021). Monitoring governmental policies and flagging plans and recommendations that are harmful to vulnerable groups are examples of the work done to enhance the external conditions in which the organisations needed to operate during the Covid-19 pandemic.…”

“…These countries were chosen because they are democratic EU nations with different welfare and socioeconomic security levels and varied infection rates that may shape the pandemic's impacts on care organisations and their clients. Only in a few of them have first steps been taken to assess and tailor systematically mitigation measures to address social vulnerabilities in crises (Orru et al, 2021). The study applies an inductive multiple case study approach (Yin, 2014), which is based on 32 semistructured interviews and three workshops with managers and staff at care organisations (see Tables A1 and A2 in the Appendix).…”

Schematizing vulnerability perceptions and understanding of drought-prone Gamo lowland communities: an evidence from Southwest Ethiopia

“…The ontological characteristics of vulnerability are found pivotal in the current debates on disaster management. The intention is to explicitly investigate the contradicting attributes of vulnerability in static features and dynamicity in terms of the referential targets (Orru et al , 2021). In this study, furtherly to explore the characteristics of vulnerability, that is the uniform or differential idiosyncrasy of vulnerability, the question “Are all households equally vulnerable to hazards and the related adversities?” was forwarded to all survey respondents.…”

Training Resources Targeting Social Media Skills to Inform Rehabilitation for People Who Have an Acquired Brain Injury: Scoping Review

“…Although people with a TBI use social media for connection and communication, few report having received formal support during rehabilitation in social media skills or safety, and those who had been cyberscammed had not been offered training after these distressing experiences [37]. Limitations in our individual abilities to use social media, communication difficulties and patterns, and the social networks we interact with are sources of vulnerability in web-based interactions [38]. In seeking connection on the web, the vulnerability of people with an ABI can be exacerbated because of changes in their executive functioning and social cognition [39], which may make it challenging for them to recognize cyberscams or regulate their own interactions.…”