What is the PAR Model?
a framework for understanding the complex interaction between natural hazards and social vulnerability that leads to disasters.
What does the PAR Model identify?
Identifies the root causes of disasters as the combination of underlying risk drivers and unsafe conditions. Underlying risk drivers include social, economic, and political factors such as poverty, inequality, and lack of access to resources. Unsafe conditions include physical factors such as unsafe buildings and infrastructure, as well as social factors such as inadequate information and warning systems.
PAR can be seen as a social structural theory what does this mean?
That dominant & unequal global development paths cause social & environmental exploitation; From addressing serious problems in the global economy that lead to inequality and marginalization to looking at peoples capacities at the local level, and to the government institutions that lie in-between
Explain the Root causes of the PAR Model
- Root causes: an interrelated set of widespread and general processes within society and world economy
- The most important root causes that give rise to vulnerability (and which reproduce vulnerability over time) are economic, demographic and political processes. These affect the allocation and distribution of resources, among different groups of people. They are a function of economic, social, and political structures, and also legal definitions and enforcement of rights, gender relations and other elements of the ideological order.
- Root causes are also connected with the function (or dysfunction) of the state, and ultimately the nature of the control exercised by the police and military, and with good governance, the rule of law and the capabilities of the administration. Root causes reflect the exercise and distribution of power in a society.
Explain the Dynamic pressure in the PAR Model
Processes and activities that ‘translate’ the effects of root causes both temporally and spatially into unsafe conditions
- Dynamic pressures channel the root causes into particular forms of unsafe conditions that then have to be considered in relation to the different types of hazards facing people.
- These dynamic pressures include epidemic disease, rapid urbanisation, current (as opposed to past) wars and other violent conflicts, foreign debt and certain structural adjustment programmes.
Explain the Unsafe conditions in the PAR Model
Forms in which the vulnerability of a population is expressed in time and space in conjunction with a hazard
- Examples include people having to live in hazardous locations, being unable to afford safe buildings, lacking effective protection by the state (for instance in terms of effective building codes), having to engage in dangerous livelihoods (such as ocean fishing in small boats, wildlife poaching, prostitution with its attendant health risks, etc.
What are some additional vulnerability/risk areas in the PAR Model?
- Urbanization
- War/conflict
- Natural resource degradation and climate change
- Global economic pressures
What is political ecology?
A field studying nature-society relations and analyzing distribution of and power over access to resources and justice; who has access to what and why? How is social organization related to disasters?
