Local Customary Laws and Decentralised Community Based Disaster Mitigation

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.201017.038How to use a DOI?

Keywords

disaster mitigation, decentralisation, community response, local resilience, customary laws

Abstract

This paper, based on secondary sources, seeks to analyse the utility of recognising local customary laws in decentralised governance, training, integration and empowerment of village-level traditional authorities, as delegates of the sovereign State, for Community Based Disaster Risk Reduction, Resilience and Mitigation (CBDRM), especially during disaster events when conventional governance through the local bureaucracy based implementation of statutory positivist State law may be constrained. Drawing upon the practical difficulties of centralised disaster mitigation governance encountered in top-down disaster relief response in developing countries during the recent COVID 19 epidemic, it makes an argument for the legal recognition and active inclusion of the regional customary socio-religious norms and actors, along with operative empowerment of existing local administrative authorities to act as effective State agents, first responders, information disseminators, and preservers of harmony, law and order during the critical initial period when isolation from, or absence of effective governance structures and severe curtailment of the statutory legal regime may be manifested following disaster events, especially in remote areas. The paper adopts the sociological jurisprudential approach to enunciate the legal theoretical basis for the recognition of customary socio-legal practises and the decentralisation of authority for dealing with natural and anthropogenic disasters.

Copyright

© 2020, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - David Pradhan
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/10/20
TI  - Local Customary Laws and Decentralised Community Based Disaster Mitigation
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Community Development (ICCD 2020)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 165
EP  - 169
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.201017.038
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.201017.038
ID  - Pradhan2020
ER  -