The Great Divide: Translating Expectations into Capabilities

What regional activities are actually taking place to increase the resilience of communities from natural hazards? Previous chapters have charted a journey through two explanations for why states have chosen to cooperate on regional DRM revealing the anticipated role of regional organizations in DRM. However, it is also necessary to go beyond expectations and analyse the operational aspects of regional activity on DRM. This provides insight into the functioning role of regional organizations and allows for a more accurate analysis on their current limitations and future possibilities. A similar quantitative scheme used to assess the anticipated role of regional organizations is applied to ten cases according to the extent to which they have development-specific regional capacities in encouraging local DRM awareness, instigating information sharing, providing operational support, developing standardized procedures and pooling DRM assets. This review reveals that a majority of regional organizations have struggled to implement regional DRM goals and consequently hold few substantial DRM-related capacities. A majority of regional organizations, for example, fail to successfully impact the community level or provide operational capacities to facilitate responses to disasters. It is also revealed that all cases, except for the EU, are heavily dependent on external donor or operational support which limits their roles as independent crisis managers.