Between trust and distrust in research with participants in conflict context

Trust is often treated as a binary where research participants either trust researchers or not, whereas in reality trust is multi-layered. Drawing on 10 months of fieldwork working with internally displaced persons and their non-displaced neighbours in rural Colombia, this article provides a more nuanced discussion of trust in research. It identifies ways in which participants are vulnerable, provides fieldwork strategies to address these vulnerabilities, and questions the assumption that extended time spent in the field necessarily results in greater trust. It argues that such beliefs underestimate the complexity of conflict and post-conflict research contexts where political and social relations are often unstable. Demonstrating that trust may be compartmentalised, and that trust and distrust can coexist, it proposes that the question researchers should ask themselves is not whether participants trust us or not but rather in what capacity and to what degree they (dis)trust us and what influences their level of trust.     

农业洪涝灾害受灾体脆弱性、恢复力及其影响因素分析

中国洪涝灾害发生的频率、范围、损失程度近年来急剧上升,对农业生产、农民生活乃至整个国民经济持续稳定发展造成直接冲击与巨大毁损。恢复力作为描述人类自身响应和发挥主体能力、积极抵御和适应外界变化的指标,与受灾体脆弱性一起构成灾害管理学不可或缺的重要因素。对农业洪涝灾害受灾体脆弱性及灾后恢复力概念进行新的定义,分析二者紧密相连又互为影响的关系,并详细分析阐述气候条件、水系分布、地貌特征、土壤与植被覆盖状况、耕地面积与结构和水土流失状况等自然环境因素,农户收入、劳动力数量、区域经济发展水平、人口规模与密度、水利设施状况、农户心理素质和文化素质等社会经济因素,以及政府组织管理、社会援助等因素对农业洪涝灾害受灾体脆弱性、恢复力的影响,为农业防灾减灾工作提供理论和决策依据。     

论海洋灾害的适应：从海洋环境资源保护与灾害应对的法制统筹展开

海洋灾害的适应必需海洋环境资源保护与灾害应对的法制统筹。统筹的法制规制与促进具体适应行动的展开,构成海洋灾害适应的完整路径。统筹的法制是适应的保障,承灾体脆弱性改善是适应的手段,将个体和群体的适应能力提升主导脆弱性改善是适应的关键。为此,应在海洋灾害防灾社区建设框架内实施灾害脆弱性改善措施;在生态补偿与灾害援助统筹之中落实灾害脆弱性改善措施;在海洋环境资源保护与灾害应对的合作模式整合基础上强化灾害脆弱性改善措施。     

Landslide Risk Models for Decision Making

This contribution presents a quantitative procedure for landslide risk analysis and zoning considering hazard, exposure (or value of elements at risk), and vulnerability. The method provides the means to obtain landslide risk models (expressing expected damage due to landslides on material elements and economic activities in monetary terms, according to different scenarios and periods) useful to identify areas where mitigation efforts will be most cost effective. It allows identifying priority areas for the implementation of actions to reduce vulnerability (elements) or hazard (processes). The procedure proposed can also be used as a preventive tool, through its application to strategic environmental impact analysis (SEIA) of land-use plans. The underlying hypothesis is that reliable predictions about hazard and risk can be made using models based on a detailed analysis of past landslide occurrences in connection with conditioning factors and data on past damage. The results show that the approach proposed and the hypothesis formulated are essentially correct, providing estimates of the order of magnitude of expected losses for a given time period. Uncertainties, strengths, and shortcomings of the procedure and results obtained are discussed and potential lines of research to improve the models are indicated. Finally, comments and suggestions are provided to generalize this type of analysis.     

Organizing insecurity: marginal subjects and narratives of injustice

In order to understand how insecurity is organized, we draw from our conversations with marginal workers from a variety of contexts in India – Tamil and Tibetan refugees, informal sector workers, contract or temporary workers and organized sector workers with apparently stable contracts. We theorize insecurity as the experience of injustice, and the structuring of inequalities to which workers are forced to give muted consent. We also read insecurity as the production of sovereignties in which the nation, state and the corporation intersect to produce regimes of injustice. Finally, we read insecurity as the abduction of the subject of the worker, and her conversion into a resource from whom value is extracted. Perhaps, the hope of resistance lies in the politics of vulnerability, a politics which undoes the subordinations and the violence of contracts.     

Environmental Vulnerability,Ecosystem Resilience and Debris Flow Disasters-Taking Disaster of Debris Flow in Dongchuan of Yunnan Province as a Case Study

The Dongchuan district of Kun-ming,Yunnan is a place where debris flows hap-pens frequently.As a result, the district is called a“natural museum of debris flow disasters”.This ar-ticle will analyze the...     

Common frailty,constructed oppression: tensions and debates on the subject of vulnerability

Vulnerability holds a contentious position in critical disability scholarship. Tension surrounding the notion of vulnerability lies primarily in its straddling of two areas of concern: the phenomenological reality of living with impairment, and the idea that vulnerability is a socially constructed entity that oppresses people with disabilities. This paper is an exploration of current and historical understandings of vulnerability, drawing from disability scholarship as well as from the theoretical tenets of Kristeva, Douglas, and Foucault. Tensions within the field are considered, as is the possibility that such debate might serve to enrich and deepen considerations of frailty in disability studies.     

On the Complex Definition of Risk: A Systems-Based Approach

The premise of this article is that risk to a system, as well as its vulnerability and resilience, can be understood, defined, and quantified most effectively through a systems-based philosophical and methodological approach, and by recognizing the central role of the system states in this process. A universally agreed-upon definition of risk has been difficult to develop; one reason is that the concept is multidimensional and nuanced. It requires an understanding that risk to a system is inherently and fundamentally a function of the initiating event, the states of the system and of its environment, and the time frame. In defining risk, this article posits that: (a) the performance capabilities of a system are a function of its state vector; (b) a system's vulnerability and resilience vectors are each a function of the input (e.g., initiating event), its time of occurrence, and the states of the system; (c) the consequences are a function of the specificity and time of the event, the vector of the states, the vulnerability, and the resilience of the system; (d) the states of a system are time-dependent and commonly fraught with variability uncertainties and knowledge uncertainties; and (e) risk is a measure of the probability and severity of consequences. The above implies that modeling must evaluate consequences for each risk scenario as functions of the threat (initiating event), the vulnerability and resilience of the system, and the time of the event. This fundamentally complex modeling and analysis process cannot be performed correctly and effectively without relying on the states of the system being studied.     

Fisheries Trade and Social Development in the Philippine‐Malaysia Maritime Border Zone

Weakly regulated natural‐resource trading activities in the remote borderlands of developing countries are commonly viewed both as a means of improving economic development and as a way of smuggling valuable natural resources. Based on data from the Philippine‐Malaysia maritime border that focus on the trade in high‐value live reef fish, this article points to the need to situate such cross‐border activities more closely within the context of local perspectives and priorities. A locally‐grounded perspective is necessary in order to understand the context of social‐development challenges that mediate both macroeconomic and environmental policy outcomes.