Capacity Building for Disaster Management: A Case of Pakistan

Disaster management is a nucleus for mitigating negative impacts of natural hazards. Its success or failure depends upon application of institutional frameworks, infrastructure development, and human and technical resources. Community participation in supporting government authorities to handle disaster-induced crises, is essential, too. It is an enhanced capacity building that provides an opportunity to Disaster Management Authorities to do collaborative decision-making for tackling natural disasters. Capacity building ensures strengthening of disaster management activities with a collective spirit of skilled force. Thus, almost all functions are placed under special control of Disaster Management Authorities which usher in an integrated adaptation of administrative activity with a shared purpose to address natural disasters. This article investigates existing capacity building for disaster management and inherent challenges, such as, insufficient infrastructure, fragmented governance, and limited resources, in Pakistan. Using capacity development theory for disaster management with qualitative methods and a descriptive research design coupled with analytical and explanatory aspects, this article analysed secondary and primary data, including interviews with experts. Purposive sampling has been used due to few experts on the topic. This study found that insufficient institutional framework, dearth of resources, poor training facilities, lack of modern technology, for example, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are the main hurdles. Therefore, capacity building looks limited. Poor performance of state’s institutions has failed to mitigate losses caused by several natural disasters, especially frequent floods. Resultantly, floods have damaged socio-economic capital. This poor showing demands a much larger meaningful capacity building for disaster management.