| dc.description.abstract | Causing major disruptions, disasters threaten more than ever the whole world, especially urban areas, where more than half of the world’s populations live in today. Influenced by several recent international initiatives, such as United Nations’ International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR), The Hyogo Framework for Action 2005–2015, and The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 (SFDRR), there has been a growing awareness and consensus on the need in risk reduction, prevention, and climate adaptation. Such initiatives highlight the importance of efforts of reducing disaster risks and building a “culture of prevention,” as part of sustainable development. This reflects a paradigm shift in the mindset from disaster response to disaster reduction and preparedness. This shift also necessitates a fundamental change from centralized disaster management to decentralized disaster governance that is supposed to involve partnerships of all stakeholders including local communities, governments, private sector, civil society organizations, etc. In order to fasten and facilitate the process of disaster reduction and preparedness, the literature usually focuses on the skills of “capacity building” of local governments. But is it really mainly a matter of capacity building? This paper finds this view simplistic and instead argues that disaster governance may hardly take place in some countries like Turkey even if they hold high skills of capacity building. Putting financial barriers aside, countries that already have a decentralized form of administration, theoretically, may easily adapt to this shift. However many countries, including Turkey, hold a long history of centralized administration that makes it quite difficult for them to adapt to this new paradigm of disaster governance no matter how often and how severely they face disasters. Given that, it becomes important to examine how such countries deal with the principal of disaster governance in terms of disaster reduction and preparedness. To explore this question, this chapter discusses the results of a qualitative study looking at the relationships of Balikesir municipalities with other local stakeholders. The data comes from in-depth interviews with ten mayors and high-rank officials. The main findings are the following: the perceptions and behaviors of municipalities towards natural disasters generally remain focused on post-disaster response. Disaster risk and vulnerability analyses are not performed. Target audiences of awareness trainings are limited to students. The concept of preparedness is not widely internalized because local knowledge actors are not allowed to be actively involved in planning processes. It is concluded that a history of centralized administration along with strong national security concerns are the main reasons behind relatively poor performance of disaster governance. However, municipality authorities have a high belief in the response capacity of the state institutions and social solidarity in the events of disasters. | en_US |
