Construction industry ignorance to disaster risk reduction

Abstract

Although experts have identified ignorance as one of the problems in implementing disaster risk reduction, studies on this subject are still relatively small. This paper aims to explore the concept of ignorance about disaster management and construction project management. Ignorance arises as a result of differences in characteristics between disaster management and infrastructure project management about disasters. Disaster management focuses on the issue of uncertainty while construction project management is accustomed to ensuring everything through detailed calculations to optimize limited resources. In contrast, construction project management handles problems through short or medium-term solutions while disaster management usually talks about long-term and continuous programs. These differences lead to different perspectives and create mental-blocked for construction industry players to implement disaster risk reduction. Ignorance is also influenced by personal factors, namely motivation and intention. Motivation can be either internal or external. The internal motivation is related to personal pleasure, interest, comfort, and satisfaction while the external one is related to somebody's efforts to achieve specific goals, getting awards, avoiding punishment or other negative consequences. This paper shows that currently, the relationship between the construction industry management and disaster management focuses more on technical and policy aspects. That is the reason why this paper suggests that construction industry player also needs to learn about human behaviors in order to understand the conflicts that might arise between the two dues to the personal factors of the actors. These three subjects are similarly essential and complementary to each other. Ignorance of disaster risk reduction is a product of human behavior. Therefore, ignoring the human-interest subject will make the construction industry player having difficulties in implementing disaster risk reduction concepts.