Premium
Towards a legal toolkit for disaster resilience and transformation
Author(s) -
Matyas David
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
disasters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.744
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1467-7717
pISSN - 0361-3666
DOI - 10.1111/disa.12430
Subject(s) - resilience (materials science) , transformational leadership , statute , state (computer science) , psychological resilience , political science , poison control , sociology , law and economics , public relations , law , computer security , engineering ethics , psychology , social psychology , engineering , computer science , medicine , physics , environmental health , algorithm , thermodynamics
Law is acknowledged as playing an important role in the growing field of disaster resilience. Still, a detailed inquiry into the possible relationships between law and disaster resilience remains largely absent from the discourse. This paper explores how legal thinking, approaches, and instruments can act as ‘tools’ in altering the nature and conditions of disaster risks. It looks at how state institutions can wield them and non‐state actors employ them to participate in processes of change. Moving beyond a resilience literature that has tended to focus on law in terms of statutes, regulations, and human rights, this paper examines the ways in which legal reasoning, procedure, and substantive law can be instrumentalised to resist shocks, provoke incremental adjustments, or even foment transformational shifts in underlying risk conditions. It concludes by suggesting that law can offer both a breadth of insights for reconceptualising how power influences resilience and a number of instruments for challenging these power structures.