Sharing responsibility in disaster management policy

Abstract

The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction delivers internationally agreed upon norms for disaster risk reduction, engendered in part through shared-responsibility, and subsequently adopted by Australia. However, it has been contended that shared-responsibility in Australia is a partially articulated social contract. Through targeted engagement with the works of Foucault, a combination of document analysis on selected disaster risk reduction policies and employing a taxonomy of obligations of shared-responsibility, we investigate if shared-responsibility signifies the failure of dominant disaster management discourses to articulate concrete responsibilities. We identify that an incomplete normalisation process is in part responsible for partial articulation.