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Political Dynamics of Slow-Onset Disasters: Contrasting Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) and Ebola Responses

Project description

A disaster study on the political dynamics of ‘other’ disasters

Climate change, pandemics and droughts generate slow-onset emergencies that overall end up affecting more people than large acute disasters. Yet they are mainly addressed as ‘other’ or something different from conventional disasters, and as such receive comparably little attention. This has also caused them to be generally overlooked in disaster research. The EU-funded SlowDisasters project will focus on the political dynamics to two slow-onset emergencies: antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and pandemics such as Ebola or COVID-19. While AMR is an incremental slow-onset disaster, pandemics display a more cyclical nature. The findings will shed light on how the political dynamics of these types of slow-onset disasters differ by comparing their response trajectories.

Objective

Disasters differ markedly in their speed and pattern of manifestation, which in turn greatly affects how researchers as well as
authorities interpret and respond to them. While theoretical innovations made by disaster researchers over the last century
have almost exclusively been developed for the study of large rapid-onset disasters, disaster assessments reveal that
elusive and slow-onset disasters affect more people on aggregate. I recently carried out a preliminary study suggesting that
slow-onset disasters have primarily been addressed as something ‘other’ than conventional disasters, and have fallen
outside of the scope of most disaster studies. We therefore lack theoretical frameworks capable of describing the policy
dynamics of slow-onset disasters, largely because existing studies focus on individual slow-onset hazards (e.g. climate
change, pandemics or droughts).

In this project, I will address this gap by studying the ways in which two types of slow-onset disasters vary through a political
response and health policy lens. By contrasting the political response trajectories of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and
Ebola I will investigate how incremental slow-onset disasters (such as AMR) differ from cyclical ones (such as Ebola) with
implications for policy response. The project will be hosted at Roskilde University (RUC), Denmark.

Empirically, the project employs a health sector focus where the global- and EU-level political response to AMR is
juxtaposed with the Ebola response using process tracing analysis. This provides both novel insight on how an incremental
slow-onset disaster (AMR) differs from a cyclical one (Ebola), as well as new knowledge on the dynamics of AMR and
pandemic policymaking. The overarching puzzle and ambition of the action is therefore to understand how different slowonset
disasters vary and which implications this variation has for precautionary planning and policy.

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Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

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MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) H2020-MSCA-IF-2019

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Coordinator

ROSKILDE UNIVERSITET
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 219 312,00
Address
Universitetsvej 1
4000 Roskilde
Denmark

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Region
Danmark Sjælland Østsjælland
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 219 312,00
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