Ecología política, desastres y gobernanza del riesgo. Tensiones y contradicciones en el mundo contemporáneo

This paper aims to highlight the correlation between the different places and mechanisms of power held by states, institutions and societies, and how these define a logic in their relationship with nature, producing environmental, social, political and cultural situations that favour the progressive and selective construction of disasters. These responsibilities are evaded and hidden through discourses of simulation that are materialised in generic and recurrent expressions such as “natural disasters” or “global climate change”, which veil the particular competences of companies or local agents in the degradation of soil or water sources through their productive activities, as well as the marginality and social exclusion that they generate through the implementation of global models that ignore local capacities and needs. These models make the population more vulnerable. This requires, in contrast, risk governance that recognises the underlying social and economic inequalities in society as generators of risk and potential disasters, that includes and highlights the perspectives, interests and participation of the most vulnerable communities in the search for alternatives that are less aggressive towards the environment and more socially, politically and economically symmetrical; in short, risk governance that promotes environmental justice.