Children and Young People's Participation in Disaster Risk Reduction: Agency and Resilience

Description

Children are the most vulnerable group in disaster situations and this book provides a new framework in disaster planning to help build resilience and protect children. Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Environmental disasters represent an increasing global social challenge. They are complex not only because of their causes, but also because of the quantity and diversity of players and strategies that are involved and coordinated to cope with them. Legal frameworks and bureaucratic emergency plans tend to homogenise the population and overlook the distinctive needs of children and young people, who are one of the most severely physically, politically and emotionally vulnerable groups in a disaster situation. Using research with over five hundred and fifty children internationally, this book argues for a transformation in children's roles in disasters and a radical shift towards child-centred ways of working that recognise their capacity in increasing disaster resilience. This book makes an important intervention and shows how policy changes will benefit at-risk communities as a whole.

Maggie Mort is Professor in the Sociology of Science, Technology & Medicine at Lancaster University. Israel Rodriguez-Giralt is Senior Research Fellow at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain. Ana Delicado is a Research Fellow at the Instituto de Ciencias Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal.

"This groundbreaking volume centres the perspectives of hundreds of diverse children and youth. Through listening carefully to what they have to say, this work fundamentally reimagines young people's role in disaster risk management." Lori Peek, University of Colorado Boulder "Based on an innovative multi-country project, this book clearly establishes the tremendous value of including children's voices in disaster risk management. It is a much-needed, engaging and important contribution." Alice Fothergill, University of Vermont "An extraordinary intervention in disaster studies. It expands our imagination about what matters and who participates in disaster planning and how to articulate meaningful and collaborative child-centred risk policies." Manuel Tironi, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile