Regional Organizations and Disaster Risk Management: Europe’s Place in the Global Picture

Abstract

Together with globalization, regionalization has been one of the most transformative processes in the international domain since the end of the Cold War. By now, almost all regions in the world have some sort of regional organization, in many cases there are even further sub-regional divisions of organizations that focus on more specific issues or even numbers of overlapping organizations. While regional integration almost everywhere initially started out as cooperation on political, economic or security issues, the activities of regional organizations have steadily expanded to a wide array of issues (Fawcett, 2004). One of these domains regional organizations have expanded into is cooperation on managing disasters caused by natural hazards,² which particularly gathered speed in the late 1990s/early 2000s and has continued unabated ever since. There is a range of possible explanations for the expansion of regional cooperation into that particular area.

The idea for this chapter and most of the data on ROs are based on a 2013 research report that I co-authored with Elizabeth Ferris for the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement titled ‘In the Neighborhood: The Growing Role of Regional Organizations in Disaster Risk Management’. It is available at http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2013/02/regional-organizations-disaster-risk-ferris, date accessed 3 December 2014.