Disaster Risk Governance as Assemblage: The Chilean Framework of the 1985 San Antonio Earthquake

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyze disaster risk governance through assemblage theory, identifying how—during the altered political context of a military regime with a centralized disaster risk management as in the case of Chile in 1985—new actors emerge during the disaster response phase as a de/reterritorialization effect that is influenced by their agencies and relationships, disfiguring the edges of the assemblage. Based on this conceptualization, it is possible to investigate the interactions between the different actors, their power relations, and their reconfigurations in the governance exercise. For this purpose, we reviewed the response phase of the 1985 San Antonio earthquake that affected the central zone of Chile, where strategic functions, institutions, and forms of power are concentrated. To describe and visualize the actors during the response phase in the disaster risk governance framework, a map of actors was developed that identifies the existing relationships and their different weights. The central scale proved to be dominant and occupied a political space that was transfigured by its overrepresentation—enforced by allies such as the banking system and business associations—enhancing a neoliberal agenda. The leaps in scale from the central scale to the local scale cancel agency of the last, destabilizing its capacity to deal with the effects of the earthquake and isolating it from the decision-making processes. Consequently, delays in providing aid demonstrate that authoritarian governments do not provide better management in the disaster response phase.

Investigating the conditions of vulnerability experienced by migrant workers during the COVID‐19 pandemic in Kerala, India

“…Assemblage-thinking has been employed across various social science disciplines to make sense of complex entanglements of social, and more-than-social, phenomena, as well as different knowledges of them (Anderson and McFarlane, 2011). Following earlier interventions, such as Grove (2013) and Donovan (2017), assemblagethinking has become increasingly popular as a lens with which to study disaster risk in recent years, to conceptualise apparatuses of disaster management (González, 2022), to examine disasters themselves as assemblages of social and material processes (Marks, 2019), and to assess the intersections between conditions of insecurity and flood events (Okoko, 2022). McGowran et al (2023) have recently used a Disaster Risk Management Assemblage approach (McGowran and Donovan, 2021) to analyse existing literature on the COVID-19 pandemic in India and suggest that people's experiences of it were shaped by their power-laden relationships with these different co-functioning socio-material assemblages.…”

Assembling fire: beyond engineering solutions

“…McGowran and Donovan’s adapted DRR AT model looks beyond positivist approaches to science to reflect on how an apparently unified field of practice is always assembled of elements drawn from multiple histories, meanings and experiences. Assemblage Theory has helped scholars frame hazards such as earthquakes (Gonzalez, 2022), landslides (Mertens, 2021) and the Covid-19 pandemic (McGowran, 2023), each time invoking different problematics such as power, governance and privilege in DRR.…”

“…In Assemblage Theory, qualitative inquiries are made into experiences of disasters “at the local level” and with an aim to create policies that are “shaped more around the needs and priorities of those affected most by disasters” (McGowran, 2023). It prioritizes the context to which humans respond to their environment (Gonzalez, 2022), and refute the practice “that reinforces the hegemony of a certain reality” (Mertens, 2021).…”