Complex Emergencies versus Natural Disasters: An Analytical Comparison of Causes and Effects

This paper compares complex humanitarian emergencies with natural disasters. The key feature of a complex emergency is the societal/institutional weakness that fails to accommodate competing identity groups, while the key characteristic of a natural disaster is the physical weakness of structures and processes that fail to compensate for extreme natural events. The main difference between complex emergencies and natural disasters is the degree of societal endogeneity of causes and effects, the former being fully endogenous, the latter being only partially so. A subordinated difference between them is the way in which the key concepts of vulnerability, proneness and the unleashing event relate to one another. In natural disasters these three concepts are mostly constant and can normally be analysed with a good deal of independence from each other, while in complex emergencies they exhibit a strong interdependency and derived variability. Finally, in complex emergencies most effects are deliberately institutional, while in natural disasters most effects are random and the institutional ones are mostly incidental and not normally important.