Disaster and Development Research and Practice: A Necessary Eclecticism?

Abstract

Those concerned with disaster and development represent a diversity of interests including the academic/theoretical, the policy-related, the practitioner-oriented, and the political. This results in the generation of different theories and literatures, varied budgets, disparate organizational structures, and diverse constituencies and worldviews. Perhaps, not surprisingly, there can be conflicting expectations, and even degrees of hostility and incomprehension, among those who deal in some way with disaster and/or development.