DIGNIFYING DISASTER RISK MANAGEMENT: FEMALE LEADERSHIP AND COMMUNITY STRATEGIES IN CAMPAMENTO DIGNIDAD, SANTIAGO DE CHILE

Abstract

Recently, it has been problematized how Disaster Risk Management, or just DRM, conceptualizes resilience and disasters in informal settlements. Through a qualitative case study and an approach that problematizes the local scale, we show what is considered a hazard by the community and how it is managed. In this way we show that communities face multiple hazards – pandemic, landslide risk, food insecurity, water shortage, floods, and fires – that are managed from strategies that rely on community organization and external and internal solidarity networks to the territory under female leadership, equitable collaboration, voluntary support, political identification and transmission of local knowledge. Our results suggest two major DRM considerations in informal settlements. First that the concept of resilience as adaptation must expand from subaltern voices and the notion of dignity as a moral category for transformation, leaving aside ideas of stability and depoliticization. And second, that it should stimulate development policies that take into account the housing problem and gender inequalities, problematizing the particular forms of relationship and organization, and therefore, the traditional categories of home.