People Centered Governance: Reducing Disaster for Poor and Excluded People

Natural and man-made disasters destroy human lives and livelihoods. This has tragic consequences for development-consequences that are exacerbated when disaster reduction policies benefit powerful groups at the expense of the poorest, and when excluded people cannot access the resources and services they are entitled to.

Local ActionAid workers around the world have repeatedly seen poor people excluded from risk reduction measures as a result of ineffective state institutions, corruption, poor accountability and a lack of political will. Such evidence leads us to conclude that the quality of governance is critical in efforts to reduce the human and economic cost of disasters in
both the short and long term.

To create the conditions needed for people-centered governance in the sphere of disaster risk reduction, governments need to promote eight key policies: participation; accountability; decentralisation; freedom of, and access to, information; legally enforceable obligations; access to justice; national coordination and cooperation and international cooperation and
coordination.