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Post-disaster Institutional and Community Responses: Uneven Outcomes on Environmental Justice and Resilience in Chaitén, Chile

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Environmental Justice and Urban Resilience in the Global South

Abstract

This chapter recounts post-disaster institutional and community responses in Chile after the Chaitén volcano eruption in 2008, and how some related processes of increasing post-disaster resilience may have impacted negatively upon environmental justice. We explore the design and implementation of post-disaster actions by national, regional and local authorities in the aftermath of a volcano eruption as ‘resilience-building measures’ and how they were contested by the practices of those initially relocated. Based on the examination of the response, recovery, relocation and reconstruction actions for Chaitén, this chapter discusses that post-disaster responses may have contributed to produce a highly segregated and environmentally unjust city where risks are unevenly distributed.

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Sandoval, V., Gonzalez-Muzzio, C., Albornoz, C. (2017). Post-disaster Institutional and Community Responses: Uneven Outcomes on Environmental Justice and Resilience in Chaitén, Chile. In: Allen, A., Griffin, L., Johnson, C. (eds) Environmental Justice and Urban Resilience in the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-47354-7_5

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