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Peoples' Perception and Response to Floodings: The Bangladesh Experience
Author(s) -
Rahman Atiur
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
journal of contingencies and crisis management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.007
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1468-5973
pISSN - 0966-0879
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-5973.1996.tb00094.x
Subject(s) - flood myth , bureaucracy , natural disaster , emergency management , coping (psychology) , corporate governance , crisis management , resilience (materials science) , perception , political science , business , economic growth , psychology , economics , geography , finance , politics , physics , archaeology , neuroscience , psychiatry , meteorology , law , thermodynamics
Bangladesh, a test case of disaster management, has been continuously internalizing lessons learned by the people, the bureaucracy and non‐governmental organizations (NGOs), after successfully responding to major natural disasters, particularly floods. The unprecedented flood of 1988 was a great educator to almost all stakeholders in Bangladesh. Since then, it has improved its capacity to cope with disasters despite some failures in its management of the macro‐economy and governance. Credit goes mostly to the ordinary people whose resilience and creativity during and after disasters have been quite heroic. This paper makes an attempt at documenting peoples’perception and response to major floods at different stages of the crisis. An illustrative plan for coping with flood disasters encompassing these stages has also been designed and outlined in this paper.