DRR in Colombia: The risk of reproducing rather than reducing disasters : A discourse analysis on the local sense-making of DRR in Huila, Colombia

Abstract: The international community has been working on reducing disaster risks for decades, investing millions of dollars and implementing hundreds of projects in Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR). There is a broad consensus nowadays between academia and practitioners of how disasters result from exposure and vulnerabilities, where it’s essential to reduce these vulnerabilities. However, regardless of all efforts made, vulnerabilities seem to persist and local knowledge is often limited due to the top-down approach of DRR-projects. Based on a field study in Huila, Colombia, this thesis examines why vulnerabilities persist by studying the local sense-making of disaster risks and DRR of the practitioners and consumers of these projects. A discourse analysis, grounded in a Foucauldian and post-structuralist approach, identifies and further analyzes discourses, considering power dynamics. The thesis findings highlight three different understandings of DRR among the participants: the Colombian Red Cross (CRC), the city's recipients and the indigenous community of Nasa Çxhaçxha. The dominant discourse of the CRC, focusing on DRR measures of self-reliance, generates knowledge that overlooks the contextual risks of the recipients, which strengthens what previous research has already concluded. The thesis can contribute to existing research by emphasizing how educational programmes for improving risk awareness have been too generalized and overlooked the contextual vulnerabilities and risks, which in turn has reproduced the dominant knowledge of DRR, generating a cyclic process that enganger to reproduce the risks and thereby also making the vulnerabilities persist.