3. Disaster Relief Provision

Providing examples from many past relief operations conducted in both developed and developing countries, this chapter presents major undesirable aspects of disaster relief disbursement. A clear understanding of these aspects is necessary for emergency managers and planners to improve their capability and performance in future disaster relief operations. These aspects are not completely new to the environmental hazard and disaster researchers because the inherent weaknesses of relief disbursement are closely associated with a several key concepts/traditions (e.g., vulnerability, political-ecological paradigm, and participatory exclusion) of the subfield. After briefly discussing these concepts, crucial aspects of disaster relief disbursement, such as biased relief distribution, and timeliness and misuse/non-use of disaster relief, are presented. Biased distribution is typically caused because of the income, age, gender, religious and ethnic affiliation, and immigration status of disaster survivors as well as region- and area-specific relief distribution. How to evaluate effectiveness of disaster relief distribution is presented next, and finally determinants of disaster relief at the country and individual/household levels are covered.