Disasters and Emergencies
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Construction Manual for Earthquake-Resistant Houses Built of Earth
The solutions proposed in this manual concentrate on low-cost single-story houses, built from earth in rural areas of earthquake-prone zones. They are based on research projects carried out at the Forschungslabor für Experimentelles Bauen (Building Research Laboratory) of the University of Kassel,...
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Listening to the Displaced
Oxfam, in partnership with Save the Children, conducted a series of annual surveys of the effectiveness of NGO relief efforts in northern Sri Lanka. Men, women and children were interviewed in depth and their perceptions and criticisms were recorded. The results of these surveys were used to inform...
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Risk-Mapping and Local Capacities
This working paper maps the range of natural hazards and other risks to which people in Mexico and Central America are exposed and relates these to the complex social, economic, political and cultural factors that make some social sectors more critically vulnerable than others in emergencies. It als...
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Building Sustainable Peace
Intense fighting in the Northern Region of Ghana in 1994 and 1995 led to the loss of 15,000 lives and the displacement of 200,000 people. A formal peace treaty negotiated by the government ended the fighting but did not address the underlying causes of the conflict, which were a complex mix of econo...
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Development in Disaster-Prone Places
This book addresses the long-overdue imbalance in disaster management: an over-emphasis on post-disaster assistance and a lack of attention to vulnerability reduction. It answers the fundamental question in this debate: how can we mould pre-disaster development initiatives to become the most appropr...
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Impact Assessment for Development Agencies
Considering the process of impact assessment, this book shows how and why it needs to be integrated into all stages of development programmes - from planning to evaluation. Its basic premise is that impact assessment should not refer to the immediate outputs of a project or programme but to any last...
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Managing Water Supply and Sanitation in Emergencies
This book is based on a public-health approach to the provision of water and sanitation in emergencies: an approach that is information-based and people-based. It emphasizes the need for a coordinated and phased response, which adapts to meet constantly changing needs. Two kinds of reader will find...
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Post-war Reconstruction in Central America
A detailed account of the formal and social processes that ended years of conflict in Central America, this study analyses various aspects of conflict resolution: forms of intervention, local participation and international cooperation. It evaluates the negotiations that took place in El Salvador, G...
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From Conflict to Peace in a Changing World
This Working Paper reproduces articles and essays which first appeared in the quarterly journal Development in Practice. The first part features papers by scholars, agency representatives, practitioners, and policy-makers on the ethical and legal dimensions of humanitarian endeavour. The second part...
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Rebuilding Communities in Refugee Settlements
This book gives a critical account of a complex and ambitious refugee-settlement programme in support of 55,000 refugees who fled in 1993 from armed conflict in south Sudan into a remote and insecure region of north-west Uganda. In helping refugees to rebuild self-reliant, sustainable communities, O...