Capabilities-Based Approach to Measuring the Societal Impacts of Natural and Man-Made Hazards in Risk Analysis

Gardoni, Paolo; Murphy, Colleen

doi:10.1061/(asce)1527-6988(2009)10:2(29)

Cited by 41 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…The key aim is to analyse the social capacity of individuals referring to flood risk management events (Gardoni and Murphy 2009). The concept focuses on vulnerability reduction and public-funded flood risk management strategies for communities who were disadvantaged.…”

Section: Egalitarianism (Maximise Rule and Equality)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Justice and flood risk management: reflecting on different approaches to distribute and allocate flood risk management in Europe

2016

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This paper compares the inherent notions of justice in four different approaches to flood risk management in Europe. As protection against flood risks becomes increasingly difficult, dilemmas of justice emerge: some benefits from flood protection measures whereas others loose. Decisions on whom to protect differentiate between upstream and downstream or left and right side of a river. This raises a central but barely discussed conflict: what (or rather who) should be protected against inundations? This question deals in essence with justice. Justice concerns questions over fairness in the allocation of resources, capital and wealth across different members of society. There are different and contradicting concepts of justice, which differ in interpretations of fair resource allocation and distributions. 'What's the right thing to protect' is thus a question of concepts of justice. This contribution is not an attempt to answer this fundamental question, but it offers a debate on how different concepts of justice provide different answers. These answers will then be related to flood risk management approaches in England, the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria.

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Section: Egalitarianism (Maximise Rule and Equality)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Justice and flood risk management: reflecting on different approaches to distribute and allocate flood risk management in Europe

2016

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“…The philosopher Colleen Murphy and the civil engineer Paolo Gardoni have tried to implement the capability approach in general risk theory (Gardoni & Murphy, 2009;. They apply the capability approach both in the (descriptive) phase of risk analysis and in the (normative) phase of risk evaluation and risk management.…”

Section: Social Justice In Disaster Management: Procedural and Distrimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The aggregated data say little about how resilience scores are distributed among the different people in one unit of analysis. Gardoni and Murphy (2009) therefore argue for computing the societal impact of a hazard at the level of relevant sub-groups, which might be geographical groups, but could also be ethnic, gender, and age groups. Whereas more descriptive approaches to resilience take the presence of certain sub-group members to be an indicator of resilience (such as the percentage of non-elderly people in a population in Cutter's index), distributive justice seems to require that these vulnerable groups be taken as the starting point for assessing resilience.…”

Section: Social Justice In Disaster Management: Procedural and Distrimentioning

confidence: 99%

Resilience indicators: opportunities for including distributive justice concerns in disaster management

Doorn

2015

Journal of Risk Research

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Abstract:This paper presents a systematic review of the concept of resilience in the field of disaster management, with a focus on the use of indicators and the inclusion of social justice considerations. The literature is reviewed with reference to various definitions of resilience, the relation between concepts of resilience and vulnerability, the conceptualization of resilience and the use of indicators, and the inclusion of social justice issues. The analysis shows that different disciplines employ various definitions of resilience and conceptions of its relation to vulnerability. Although recognized as important, distributive issues are not currently addressed in the literature. As a result, we lack a clear sense of what equality or distributive justice should mean in the context of resilience and disaster management. An approach based on capabilities is proposed as a promising way forward.

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“…Risks: To guard against systematic injustice in the distribution of risks, it is important to know who might bear the negative impact and who might benefit in addition to knowing the aggregate risk a society is taking, [5,7].…”

Section: An Approach Should Provide a Picture Of The Societal Distribmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Acceptability and the Tolerability of Societal Risks: A Capabilities-based Approach

Murphy

Gardoni

2007

Sci Eng Ethics

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In this paper, we present a Capabilities-based Approach to the acceptability and the tolerability of risks posed by natural and man-made hazards. We argue that judgments about the acceptability and/or tolerability of such risks should be based on an evaluation of the likely societal impact of potential hazards, defined in terms of the expected changes in the capabilities of individuals. Capabilities refer to the functionings, or valuable doings and beings, individuals are able to achieve given available personal, material, and social resources. The likely impact of a hazard on individuals' capabilities should, we argue, be compared against two separate thresholds. The first threshold specifies the minimum level of capabilities attainment that is acceptable in principle for individuals to have in the aftermath of a hazard over any period of time. This threshold captures the level that individuals' capabilities ideally should not fall below. A risk is acceptable if the probability that the attained capabilities will be less than the acceptable level is sufficiently small. In practice, it can be tolerable for some individuals to temporarily fall below the acceptable threshold, provided this situation of lower capabilities attainment is temporary, reversible, and the probability that capabilities will fall below a tolerability threshold is sufficiently small. This second, tolerable threshold delimits an absolute minimum level of capabilities attainment below which no individual in a society should ever fall, regardless of whether that level of capabilities attainment is temporary or reversible. In this paper, we describe and justify this Capabilities-based Approach to the acceptability and tolerability of risks. We argue that the proposed theoretical framework avoids the limitations in current approaches to acceptable risk. The proposed approach focuses the attention of risk analysts directly on what should be our primary concern when judging the acceptability and the tolerability of risks, namely, how risks impact the well-being of individuals in a society. Also, our Capabilities-based Approach offers a transparent, easily communicable way for determining the acceptability and the tolerability of risks.

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Capabilities-Based Approach to Measuring the Societal Impacts of Natural and Man-Made Hazards in Risk Analysis

Cited by 41 publications

References 22 publications

Justice and flood risk management: reflecting on different approaches to distribute and allocate flood risk management in Europe

Justice and flood risk management: reflecting on different approaches to distribute and allocate flood risk management in Europe

Resilience indicators: opportunities for including distributive justice concerns in disaster management

The Acceptability and the Tolerability of Societal Risks: A Capabilities-based Approach

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