Disaster Risk Governance in Education

Abstract

 The request for "school closures throughout the country" issued in response to the spread of COVID-19 severely restricted children's rights to learn and grow and develop, without legal, scientific or procedural justice. Children are vulnerable and therefore easily deprived of their rights in times of disaster. The purpose of this paper is to examine the basic framework and theoretical background of Disaster Risk Governance (DRG) with the aim of placing children's rights and intentions on a basis of crisis management in school education.

 Measures against unknown infectious diseases sometimes severely limit our rights and freedoms; it is thus important to guarantee and compensate for restricted rights and freedoms and to be accountable to persons undergoing this restriction. In this respect, the request for "school closures throughout the country" imposed a unilateral and enormous burden on children and caused a great infringement of their rights, without any remedial measures. In addition, school administrators complied with unfounded requests and implemented the simultaneous closures without acting on their guaranteed autonomy.

 DRG refers to the development and implementation of disaster crisis management, more specifically crisis prevention and avoidance plans (crisis control/risk management) from a medium- to long-term perspective, and measures to minimize damage when a crisis occurs (crash management), through horizontal and bidirectional interactions among various people. From a different point of view, it is a denial of unidirectional crisis management on the part of public authorities.

 The theory of DRG is based on two perspectives: understanding disaster through constructionism and emphasizing democratic decision-making. The former means that the presence and degree of damage caused by natural phenomena are affected by individual vulnerabilities. In other words, "vulnerable people" such as women, children, and people with disabilities etc. are more likely to be affected than those who are not, and the extent of the damage is often enormous. Thus, DRG argues that the participation of vulnerable people in governance, reflecting their rights and intentions and managed by democratic decision-making, enhances the resilience of society as a whole to risks.

 Application of the above basic framework to the crisis management of school education is an effective way to ensure children's learning and their growth and development. Children, who are vulnerable to disasters, tend to be ignored by adults. For this reason, crisis management focusing on the rights and intentions of children is required. In crisis management of school education based on DRG, it is necessary to focus on the rights and intentions of children in planning and implementing both crisis control/risk management and crash management. To that purpose, it is also necessary to activate the autonomy of school administrators, who are close to children and the community.