The Politics of Zoning: Making Risks (In)visible in Disasters

Zoning or hazard mapping exercise is often utilized by policymakers and public authorities to manage disaster risks. This exercise is only possible when potential risks have already been identified, quantified and assessed by scientific experts at the outset. In other words, unidentified or unrecognized risks will not appear on the map, hence become invisible from administrators and the public. As Ulrich Beck (2008) described, “so long as risks are not recognized scientifically, they do not exist – at least not legally, medically, technologically, or socially, and thus they are not prevented, treated or compensated for”. This paper examines the role of expert institutions and authorities in defining, thus making (in)visible, risks through zoning/mapping exercise prior to and in the aftermath of disasters. This map, once established, forms the legitimate base and functions as the authority to categorize citizens into different status and its associated rights. The paper attempts to deconstruct this transformation process of hazards into risks, the territorialisation of risks via mapping, whereby matters that are scientifically uncertain or intangible would be made circumscribable both spatially and temporally. Our paper uses two case studies, one on evacuation zones after the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the other on hazard mapping prior to volcano eruptions in the Lesser Antilles, to illustrate how this political and administrative tool of zoning reifies hazards, thus making any disaster risks appear “manageable” and controllable by the authorities, and results in creating de facto different categories of affected populations, which triggers tension and division within the communities as well as in the scientific community. We also examine the role of independent experts and citizen mobilisations in challenging these zoning policies and contesting the management of territorialised risks