4. Objective, Methodology and Scope

The objective of this review is to demonstrate whether, on the basis of literature available, local institutions play a role in natural DRM at the household and at several institutional levels, and, if they do, to understand how this occurs, and what are the strengths and weaknesses of the actors and stakeholders involved in increasing DRM capacity at several levels. Achieving this objective implied:

• Investigating how local institutions have dealt with actual disaster events and/or mitigated their impact on their members/constituencies;

• Analysing how population groups in disaster-prone areas have usually dealt with and are dealing with disaster risk, rehabilitation and development through local institutions;

• Assessing the implications of mitigating disaster risk for local institutions and their effectiveness at doing so as well the impact of the wider institutional environment;

• Identifying lessons learnt from local institutions’ involvement in DRM, focusing on potential improvements in terms of their role and organisational development needs;

• Providing elements of a pro-poor DRM strategy that highlights and strengthens the role played by local institutions, and that leaves local actors better equipped to deal with the disaster management cycle; and

• Elaborating how policy and operational support at sub-national, national and international level can better sustain local institutions in DRM and longer-term development.

This literature review focuses less on the myriad of “informal” local institutions that are also standard local practices such as those derived from custom (like, e.g., certain context-specific agricultural traditions within a given farming system that have evolved and become adapted over many generations to suit local exposure to potential natural disasters^[4]). In looking at existing local institutions, emphasis was placed on those with relatively more potential to bridge the mitigation-development continuum, and microfinance institutions (MFIs) were singled out as promising to that effect.

With respect to natural disasters, the present paper concentrates on rapid onset phenomena such as floods, hurricanes, snowstorms and earthquakes and their associated effects (e.g., landslides, heavy rains, etc.), rather than slow onset phenomena such as droughts, or some other often protracted events such as rodents, predators and pests, or human and animal epidemics - which is another reason for more examples coming from Asia and Latin America rather than from Africa. Neither included are volcanic eruptions, because of their more localised effects, nor bush and grassland fires and other such events, because these are mostly man-made (and thus not ‘purely natural’), rather than predominantly meteorological and seismic in origin^[5].

The secondary data collected comes from all developing regions and sources; the way to access the material has been mostly through the internet, where a range of studies, project documents, strategy briefs, newsletters, etc. has been downloaded in either English, French, Spanish, Portuguese or German. Other information was provided by colleagues working in or with projects that contain DRM components.