Disaster, Development and Financing (DDF) Workshop
Development finance and disasters have a complex relationship. On one hand, disasters affect development positively and negatively (Rodriguez, Quarentelli, and Dynes 2006). Disasters sap public resources, foment dissatisfaction with leadership, and strain developing economies, but they can also enhance political trust, improve accountability, and ultimately result in better oversight and greater personal security (Reinhardt 2015a; Teets 2009). Development also conditions disasters. Careful industrialization helps fortify developing areas physically and administratively, improving their ability to mitigate and manage disasters. Imprudent development sabotages infrastructure, political trust, and public administrations, thus both increasing a community’s likelihood and decreasing its ability to handle disasters (Reinhardt 2015a).
Development financers struggle to determine how to target resources toward interventions that will aid development, strengthen community resilience, and avert disasters. Evidence indicates donors pulling aid from crisis areas (Balla and Reinhardt 2008), despite humanitarian arguments against such decisions. Clear academic support for a particular strategy does not exist.
One reason for the lack of academic consensus is that studying the relationship between disasters, development, and financing is complicated by the very nature of disasters. Research in the post-disaster context demands careful attention to the ethics and limitations of working with disaster-stricken populations. Work with experiments and voluntary subjects, as in pre-disaster surveys, suffers from a lack of generalizability, and of participant and population validity (Reinhardt 2015a). Randomized controlled trials (RCTs), a rigorous research tool that allow us to isolate causal mechanisms and generalize to larger populations, have been largely unavailable to disaster researchers due to the above ethical and accessibility issues. Yet recent work indicates that responsible, generalizable survey/field experiments are possible in disaster work (Reinhardt 2015b).
This workshop's aim is to bring together researchers and practitioners to create rigorous RCTs ready to investigate important policy questions, and present workshop results to key disaster and development policy makers. The endeavour is critical to direct development aid toward lessening disasters’ impact and saving lives.
Academic participants will provide expertise on administering randomised controlled trials in developing countries, and on the ethical and practical dilemmas associated with disaster-oriented research. Practitioner participants will detail which questions are the most pressing in their endeavour to minimize disaster damage. The workshop will create linkages facilitating the dissemination of research and policy advice. Together attendees will design feasible and informative RCTs that allow rigorous investigation of pressing policy issues. The workshop will generate policy advice that informs both development financers and developing communities as to the most prudent ways to avert, alleviate, mitigate, and manage disasters.