Abstract
Does the occurrence of flood disaster increase the risk of communal conflict and if so, does trust in state political institutions mitigate the adverse effect? This study addresses these questions by studying the intervening effect of trust in local governmental institutions at a sub-national level. The effect of flood disasters on the risk of communal violence is expected to be contingent on peoples’ trust that local political structures are able to address potential disputes between groups. Violent conflicts, in that sense, are neither inevitable nor directly determined by the occurrence of disasters. They largely depend on the context of a given society and political response to these external shocks. To test this expectation, the study uses survey data on trust in local state institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa from the Afrobarometer (2005–2018), combined with geo-referenced communal conflict and flood data. In line with theoretical expectations, results suggest that flood disasters are associated with communal violence only for administrative districts that are governed by distrusted local state institutions. Conversely, flood disasters tend to be negatively associated with the risk of communal clashes in the presence of highly trusted local government councils and (especially) trusted judicial courts. Changing model specifications and estimation techniques produces similar results. An out-of-sample cross-validation also shows that accounting for political variables, in addition to flood disasters, improves the predictive performance of the model.
Highlights
Academic, policy and popular discussions surrounding the issue of climate variability and extreme weather events have received increasing attention in recent years (IPCC, 2018)
Flood disasters and communal conflict The theoretical argument suggests that the occurrence of flood disaster is associated with the risk of communal conflict, and that the probability is higher in districts with low trust in local state institutions
This study empirically evaluates the relationship between flood di sasters, trust in local state institutions and incidences of violent communal conflict
Summary
Policy and popular discussions surrounding the issue of climate variability and extreme weather events have received increasing attention in recent years (IPCC, 2018). Shifting weather patterns are predicted to increase the frequency and intensity of hot extremes, including heatwaves (very likely), and heavy precipitation (high confi dence) (IPCC, 2021). These hazard events, as natural phenomena, have the potential to become disasters when causing substantial death and damage (Slettebak, 2012). Exploration of the indirect and conditional pathways, is a rapidly growing field. Scholars have studied intervening mechanisms such as agricultural production and living conditions Scholars have studied intervening mechanisms such as agricultural production and living conditions (e.g. Koren, 2018; Vesco et al, 2021; Vestby, 2019), food price changes (e.g. Maystadt & Ecker, 2014), economic growth (e.g. Cavallo et al, 2013; Koubi et al, 2012) and migration (Koubi et al, 2016; Linke et al, 2018b)
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