Disaster Diplomacy in South Asian Countries: Readiness and Dependency

Abstract

Disasters disrupt daily lives and social systems and question prevailing social, economic, environmental, and political arrangements. Directly and indirectly, they create the conditions for instability and conflict by exacerbating social grievances and resource scarcities and accelerating changes in social systems. Despite a plethora of studies in the disaster realm, however, negligible attention has been devoted to understanding disaster diplomacy. This study takes a preliminary step in that direction, analyzing disasters in eight South Asian countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. The study focuses on these countries’ readiness for disaster management and dependency on foreign assistance in disaster and climate change-related policy formulation. It is based on five key disasters in each country (1990-2021) based on total deaths and people affected. Out of the eight South Asian countries, Afghanistan showed no readiness regarding climate policies. Likewise, Maldives has shown low readiness for the development of policies for disaster risk reduction. Out of the 80 policies studied about development assistance, only about 36 percent were found to be completely self-funded. In the top five disasters per country, the highest support was on technical assistance, which was provided in 82.5 percent of the disasters. In the maturity model, Afghanistan and Nepal were found in the classification of system discipline, which represents low development in disaster management. At the same time, Bangladesh and Bhutan were assessed to be in optimization classification, representing good indicators of disaster management. Overall, the research aims to enable an understanding of disaster diplomacy in the study countries by accessing the readiness and dependencies. More importantly, the findings from this study can be helpful for South Asian countries to identify the areas to strengthen their readiness and dependencies, develop resiliency, and focus on a collaborative approach to reducing disaster and climate risks for the future.

Keywords: Disaster diplomacy, South Asian countries, resiliency, climate risk, maturity model