Strategies for disaster risk reduction and management: Are lessons from past disasters actionable?

This research is about disaster risk reduction and management using learning from past disasters as theoretical framework because disasters and crises continue to re-occur for the same reasons they could have been prevented and mitigated. This chapter has two main aims. First, to consider how lessons from past disasters, may be linked to strategies for disaster risk reduction and management. Second, critically review how lessons from disasters can be made actionable in an organizational context using conceptual model of actionable learning from disasters. Historically, proximate cause and nature of risk, crisis and disaster has generated intense theories and models in both the social and pure sciences. Albeit the applied implications of existing risk and disaster theories are questionable, this research informs the debates about risk, crisis and disaster management theory and practice by considering and reflecting on mindfulness, complexity, modernity, fragility, isomorphic learning, and policies ambiguity; and the application of disasters lessons from cross-organizational isomorphism, event isomorphism and self-isomorphism. One of the fundamental contributions involved using case studies of two emergency and disaster response organizations in Ghana and Nigeria which were used to address the issues raised in the research. In conclusion, the chapter reflected on the challenges of learning from past disasters, devoted to the explanation of disaster risk reduction strategies and its components: identification, prevention, reduction, mitigation and appraisal, evaluation, management and communication, flexibility, resilience and robustness. The main lessons and implications from “actionable learning from disasters model” to disaster risk reduction and management are discussed.