Better Together: Regional Capacity Building for National Disaster
Risk Management
Desk Review
August 6, 2014
By Elizabeth Ferris
When a disaster strikes, national disaster management organizations (NDMOs) are called to
respond quickly and effectively, usually in collaboration with local governmental authorities.
These are the governmental agencies that are on the front lines of response and increasingly on
the front lines of efforts to reduce the risk of disasters. For many years, international
humanitarian organizations and bilateral aid donors have worked to strengthen the capacity of
NDMOs. But, in spite of a growing literature on the role of regional organizations in disaster risk
management, there have been few efforts to assess the role of regional organizations in building
the capacity of NDMOs.
The Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement, with the support of the Australian Civil-
Military Centre, is currently undertaking field-based research on the role of three regional
organizations – the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the South Asian
Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), and the Pacific Islands Forum/South Pacific
Community – in building capacity of national disaster management organizations. This initiative
builds on a 2013 study, In the Neighborhood: The Role of Regional Organizations in Disaster
Risk Management carried out by Brookings with the support of the ACMC which provided a
global overview of the expanding involvement of regional organizations with a particular
emphasis on regional actors in the Pacific and the Caribbean.
The study identified some of the
particular strengths of regional approaches to disasters. For example, in the Pacific region,
regional organizations were found to have clear comparative advantages including: “political
convening power through strong links with the region’s leaders; key coordinating roles at the
regional level; information management and dissemination through portals, provision of
education, training and applied research; faith-based perspectives and actions in disaster risk
management (DRM); representatives of, and advocates for, vulnerable groups (e.g. women,
disabled, youth); and their extensive and broad regional experience.”
Because of their close ties
Elizabeth Ferris is the co-director of the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement and a senior fellow in
Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. With thanks to Anne Connell for her research
assistance and to Steven Zyck and Ingrid Nfosi-Sutton for their helpful comments.
Elizabeth Ferris and Daniel Petz, In the Neighborhood: The Role of Regional Organizations in Disaster Risk
Management, Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement, February 2013,
http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2013/02/regional-organizations-disaster-risk-ferris; Patricia Weiss
Fagen, “Natural Disasters in Latin America and the Caribbean: National,
Regional and International interactions” HPG Working Paper, October 2008,
http://www.odi.org.uk/sites/odi.org.%20uk/files/odi-assets/publications-opinion-files/3415.pdf.
John Hays, Roles of Pacific Regional Organizations in Disaster Risk Management: Questions and Answers,
Brookings Institution, July 2013, p. v. 2. http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2013/07/pacific-regional-
organizations-disasters
