Risk, but for whom?: The ‘crisis’ of problematization and its impact on hazard and disaster risk management

Abstract (English)

In Ontario, Canada, urban flood risk, or flooding that occurs away from rivers, streams or lakes is a threat to public safety left officially unidentified and unmanaged by municipal, provincial and federal government agencies. Likewise, tornado risk in Ontario schools, though officially identified by operational meteorologists with Environment and Climate Change Canada and communicated to the Ontario public, research has shown that its management within Ontario school communities is diminished compared to other hazards, such as extreme heat or extreme cold temperatures. These realities in risk governance exist despite the presence of hazard exposure and impacts, including a known rate of tornado occurrence in certain Ontario school boards as well as the August 2018 case of urban flooding where two Toronto residents became trapped in an elevator, to name just two. Underpinned by Foucault’s approach to knowledge and discourse (Hall 2001), the purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we aim to explore the power of, and unintended consequences surrounding, problematization in hazard and risk management, or the way that certain phenomena come to be framed and constituted as problems to be addressed (Mennicken and Miller 2014). As per Foucault (Deacon 2000), problems are not objective ‘sitting out there’ ideas, but rather a delicate process of assembling and aligning actors and arguments such that a measure of agreement is achieved. The result, as Li (2007) describes, borrowing from James Ferguson, is the production of any number of intelligible fields, those with specifiable limits and particular characteristics, and conceptual boundaries. Thus, the act of problematizing renders certain threats visible and others less visible or invisible altogether; it renders some ideas about hazards and risks amenable to analysis and intervention, and others not problematized, left unidentified and unmanaged. Second, we aim to discuss the extent that problematization contributes to ontological differences among social groups and the role that anthropology/anthropologists should play in reconciling these differences in our pursuit of disaster risk reduction, in other words answering the question: ‘risk, but for whom?’.