Exploring the gap between policy and action in disaster risk reduction

The transition from a response-based paradigm to an anticipative, prevention-based approach remains a stubborn challenge in Disaster Risk Reduction. International policy guidelines have successfully informed the national DRR policies in various countries; however, their further translation down to the regional and local level is full of complex political challenges, exacerbated in many areas by an increased frequency of disasters. Through an analysis of the evolution of landslide risk governance during the last two decades in two hilly regions - Darjeeling in the Himalayas and the Nilgiris in the Western Ghats - we demonstrate that while the national government appears to have made considerable efforts to move in line with the UNDRR approaches, the eventual outcome of these efforts at the regional and local level is largely an incremental improvement on the existing DRR approach and not a paradigm shift in understanding and addressing disaster risk. Our findings have instead shown that India’s DRR policy framework struggles in implementing its intentions because the policy discourse is decontextualised and shifts in understanding disasters as being driven by social factors have not occurred. Therefore, we argue that overcoming the existing gap between DRR policy and action requires attentiveness to a situated understanding of disasters and institutions at the local level, and not treating apparent gaps between policy and action as functional challenges to be overcome merely with new science from national level.