Social Vulnerability - History of The Concept

History of The Concept

In the 1970s the concept of vulnerability was introduced within the discourse on natural hazards and disaster by O´Keefe, Westgate and Wisner (O´Keefe, Westgate et al. 1976). In “taking the naturalness out of natural disasters” these authors insisted that socio-economic conditions are the causes for natural disasters. The work illustrated by means of empirical data that the occurrence of disasters increased over the last 50 years, paralleled by an increasing loss of life. The work also showed that the greatest losses of life concentrate in underdeveloped countries, where the authors concluded that vulnerability is increasing.

Chambers put these empirical findings on a conceptual level and argued that vulnerability has an external and internal side: People are exposed to specific natural and social risk. At the same time people possess different capacities to deal with their exposure by means of various strategies of action (Chambers 1989). This argument was again refined by Blaikie, Cannon, Davis and Wisner, who went on to developed the Pressure and Release Model (PAR) (see below). Watts and Bohle argued similarly by formalizing the “social space of vulnerability”, which is constituted by exposure, capacity and potentiality (Watts and Bohle 1993).

Cutter developed an integrative approach (hazard of place), which tries to consider both multiple geo- and biophysical hazards on the one hand as well as social vulnerabilities on the other hand (Cutter, Mitchell et al. 2000). Recently, Oliver-Smith grasped the nature-culture dichotomy by focusing both on the cultural construction of the people-environment-relationship and on the material production of conditions that define the social vulnerability of people (Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 2002).

Research on social vulnerability to date has stemmed from a variety of fields in the natural and social sciences. Each field has defined the concept differently, manifest in a host of definitions and approaches (Blaikie, Cannon et al. 1994; Henninger 1998; Frankenberger, Drinkwater et al. 2000; Alwang, Siegel et al. 2001; Oliver-Smith 2003; Cannon, Twigg et al. 2005). Yet some common threads run through most of the available work.