Vulnerability-resilience to the risk-disaster process: An analysis from the political ecology

Abstract

The notions of vulnerability and resilience have been installed as central explanatory categories for the process of disaster risk, both in the academic and institutional spheres. Nevertheless, both notions have been configured as floating signifiers of the discursive field of disaster risk management, presenting different assumptions, expressions, emphasis and relational forms. From this, the present work seeks to analyze, at first, the construction of the discourse of vulnerability-resilience in the academic-institutional field, to later explore the production of vulnerability and the emergence of local resilience, under the prism of Chile’s extractivist capitalocene. By way of conclusion we affirm the importance of incorporating into the discussion of disaster risk reduction both conceptual clarification and the differential dialectic relationship between vulnerability and resilience at a global scale, understanding that the strengthening of capacities must be accompanied by the reduction of spatial and environmental injustices.