Disaster Resilience of Handicapped People and Local Organizations in Van

Turkey’s disaster management approach has been going through a transformation from crisis management to risk management during the last decade. Risk management approach is based on a participatory organization and its objective is to identify potential hassards before dissasters and mitigate or prevent them. Local administrations and civil society organizations assume vital responsibilities towards these ends in disaster resilient societies. However local actors, such as grass roots organizations of vulnerable groups, do not have capacity (knowledge, skills and experience) for accomplishing expected responsibilities in such societal systems which do not delegate power to local bodies. As such, there was almost no preparedness regarding the handicapped people’s resilience during the Van earthquakes in 2011 despite good guidence for action to combat disasters provided by the Hyogo Framework since 2009. Afterwards Turkey also officially adopted the Sendai Framework in 2015, which was an improved version of the Hyogo Framework. Now one may ask as to what extent the positive effects of these international guides for action become visible in practice in a local setting, Van. This article provides answers as to whether the municipality and civil society organizations in Van help increase disaster awareness and preparedness among handicapped people, and whether their organizational capacities and cooperation with other collective entitites have increased towards resilience. The qualitative research is based on data collected by in-depth interviews with the representatives and members of these organizations during 2018-2019. Research findings indicate local organizational capacieties and bottlenecks as well as possible solutions to main obstacles towards community resilience. It is expected that these updated and realistic findings derived from a local setting will contribute to the design of a comprehensive program for increasing the resilience level of the handicapped people living in Turkey’s disaster zones