Disaster and Development

This chapter discusses the relationship between law, disasters, and development. Despite the long-standing and intimate relationship between disasters and development there is surprisingly little legal scholarship on the subject. The chapter offers a historical and conceptual framework for understanding the relationship and its impact on international law and policy-making and argues the adoption of Sustainable Development Goals and the advent of paradigms such as resilience, climate change adaptation, and catastrophic risk management are rationalizing our understanding of disasters along new and unchartered trajectories. Ignoring the legal, political, and economic causes of global inequality, experts and policy-makers committed to these paths often rely on ahistorical assumptions. In order to counter these trends, scholars must turn their attention to how the international economic system and objectivist claims underlying development agendas and metrics may be structuring relations between and within countries in ways that entrench historical inequities rather than ground promises of hope.