Children and Young People?s Participation in Disaster Risk Reduction: Agency and Resilience

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence.

Disasters are an increasingly common and complex combination of environmental, social and cultural factors. Yet existing response frameworks and emergency plans tend to homogenise affected populations as ‘victims’, overlooking the distinctive experience, capacities and skills of children and young people.

Drawing on participatory research with more than 550 children internationally, this book argues for a radical transformation in children’s roles and voices in disasters. It shows practitioners, policy-makers and researchers how more child-centred disaster management, that recognises children’s capacity to enhance disaster resilience, actually benefits at-risk communities as a whole.

Maggie Mort is a Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University. She is also the Coordinator of the EC Horizon 2020 project, CUIDAR: Cultures of Disaster Resilience among children and young people.

Israel Rodríguez-Giralt is Senior Research Fellow at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain.

Ana Delicado is a Research Fellow at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal.