Geoscience Reference
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(2003) documents how changes in the local economy increased children's exposure
and vulnerability to waterborne health hazards through their impacts on women's
workloads. Fordham (1998) explored the gendered experience of fl ooding in Britain
to make the case that socially produced gendered spaces make women differentially
vulnerable to environmental hazards.
Beyond diagnosing the causality of vulnerability to environmental hazards, polit-
ical ecological research has also been attentive to political economic drivers of
post-disaster recovery issues. Empirical examples of post disaster policy changes
and reconstruction have not been very encouraging in terms of addressing pre-
existing vulnerability to hazards. Mustafa (2004) challenged the notion of restoring
normalcy as an objective of fl ood relief and recovery when the pre-existing con-
ditions were characterised by high levels of poverty, disempowerment and vulner-
ability. In the context of Hurricane Mitch, Brown (2000) traces the pattern of
vulnerability that had been in place because of United States' strong support of
neoliberal reforms in the Nicaraguan economy under the auspices of international
fi nancial institutions. Brown (2000) expresses skepticism that supposedly right
words calling for transformation of Nicaraguan society through post-Mitch recon-
struction will involve any profound shift in US policies that contributed to the
country's vulnerability in the fi rst place. Wisner (2001) in fact documents how
post-Mitch recovery and reconstruction did not implement mitigation measures to
prevent comparable losses from the 2001 earthquake in El Salvador. He attributes
the failure to the El Salvador government's adherence to extreme form of free
market ideology and the deep fi ssures in the society following the long and bloody
civil war.
Running alongside these various radical but neo-realist approaches to under-
standing the social structuring of hazards and vulnerability to them, has been a rela-
tively less infl uential but no less theoretically important strand of post-structuralist
inspired research. Early work by Waddell (1977) and Hewitt (1983) pointed to the
importance of human social systems and discursive constructs in framing hazards
as 'unscheduled' or 'accidental' interruptions of 'normal' life. The initial invitation
to engage with hazards from a post-structuralist perspective was later given an
impetus by a turn towards post-structuralist thinking in wider human-environment
relations research, as exemplifi ed by the social-nature thesis advanced by Castree
and Braun (2001). The 'social nature' or 'socionature' argument does not deny the
materiality of non-human entities, but rather argues that we cannot separate their
material existence from our knowledge of them. In other words there is no
Olympian point from which we can gain value-free objective knowledge of non-
human nature's existence. The socionature thesis is not intended mainly to stand
judgement on the truth or falsity of claims about nature, but primarily points out
how discourses on nature create their own truths (Castree, 2001, Demeritt, 2001).
Drawing upon the socio-nature insights within geography, Mustafa (2005) outlined
an approach to hazards he termed 'hazardscapes'. It posits that the material geog-
raphies of hazardousness and social responses are the outcome of various discursive
constructs and interactions among hazard victims and managers with varying
degrees of power/knowledge. In the case of urban fl ood plain in Pakistan, Mustafa
(2005) contrasted the multifaceted understanding of fl ood plain residents of their
environment as a hazardscape containing multiple interlinked social and environ-
mental hazards with the dominant state vision of them as a series of administrative
domains to be dealt with in isolation. The dominant Pakistani state's focus on the
