Natural Disasters and Weak Government Institutions: Creating a Vicious Cycle that Ensnares Developing Countries

Mahadevia Ghimire Kanksha ()
Additional contact information
Mahadevia Ghimire Kanksha: Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, 78 Queens Park, Toronto, Ontario M5S 2C5, Canada

The Law and Development Review, 2021, vol. 14, issue 1, 59-104

Abstract: In the vast literature on natural disasters one aspect is largely unexplored, and this is the two-way relationship between natural disasters and the performance of public (government) institutions responsible for mitigating these natural disasters. The first relationship is that poor performance of public institutions responsible for mitigating natural disasters worsens the impact of natural disasters. The disaster literature is silent on the second relationship that, I argue, exists between natural disasters and public institutions: natural disasters can overwhelm the public institutions responsible for mitigating natural disasters and, as a result, it may make them even more ineffective. This paper is my attempt to fill this gap. I argue that this two-way relationship creates a particularly serious problem for developing countries, having the potential to trap developing countries in a vicious cycle: poor performance of public institutions triggering natural disasters, and natural disasters making public institutions more ineffective by overwhelming them. The exploration of this two-way relationship is necessary to have a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which natural disasters can detrimentally impact developing countries. The paper concludes that to break this vicious cycle, as a first step developing countries need to focus on institutional reform. Reform proposals should aim at improving the performance of the public institutions that are directly responsible for mitigating natural disasters. To address this challenge, scholars and governments must specifically identify the public institutions that are responsible for particular activities under review. Only then can the following questions be explored: what are the weaknesses of such public institutions, and how can their performance be improved?

Keywords: natural disasters; government institutions; developing countries; natural hazards; institutional reform (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/ldr-2020-0014 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:lawdev:v:14:y:2021:i:1:p:59-104:n:2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/ldr/html

DOI: 10.1515/ldr-2020-0014

Access Statistics for this article

The Law and Development Review is currently edited by Yong-Shik Lee

More articles in The Law and Development Review from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().