4.2.1 Technological and Infrastructural Preconditions and Pressures

Technological and infrastructural changes are often linked to mitigation measures and long-term changes after the occurrence of a disaster, and we address those changes and effects in Chapter 5. Equally important, however, are the technology and infrastructure already present before a hazard or shock, which help us to understand how a disaster unfolds.

Societies develop their technology and infrastructure under particular economic, social, and political conditions. Agricultural technology in sub-Saharan Africa can provide an illuminating example. One of the factors contributing to the persistence of famine in Africa up to the present day is low agricultural productivity. In the 1950s and 1960s, agriculture in the Western world, but also in large parts of Latin America and Asia, was transformed by technological innovations such as high-yielding or drought-resistant varieties of cereals, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and improved techniques for irrigation, which allowed agricultural production to keep up with population growth or even exceed it. Large parts of Africa, however, lagged behind: an African ‘Green Revolution’ did not materialize. Even today, many African smallholders have only very limited access to the technological means to raise productivity. Yields are very low: in fact, food production per capita has declined by about 10 percent since the early 1960s.Footnote ¹⁴ Obviously, behind this chronic under-production lie other factors: widespread poverty, limited access to education, and a lack of government support for subsistence agriculture, for example. Furthermore, factors not related to agricultural production also contribute to the persistence of famine, such as weak internal markets, armed conflict, poorly functioning governments, and perhaps also the liberalization of the global food trade. The fact remains, however, that Africa’s vulnerability to famine is in part determined by the state of technological development of its agriculture.

In many cases infrastructure and technology were shaped not just by general economic, social, and political conditions, but also by responses to previous hazards and shocks. Until the nineteenth century, most inhabitants of European and North American cities were dependent on water pumps and wells for their drinking water. The introduction of piped-in water supply systems was partly a reaction to the health risks posed by contaminated drinking water. The availability of running water, however, led to a large-scale increase of water consumption. Among the many innovations introduced were water closets in the houses of the well-to-do. These water closets were not yet connected to a sewage system, but used underground vaults and cesspools as the main manner of disposal. Leaking vaults and overflowing pools could easily infiltrate the water tables used for the remaining wells and pumps, actually increasing health hazards instead of reducing them. Contaminated and polluted water, therefore, became an increasing pressure in changing cities.

This combination of risks could eventually lead to disaster, as happened in London, when the bacterium Vibrio cholerae was found in a water pump in Broad Street, causing an epidemic outbreak of cholera. By carefully mapping the first casualties, physician John Snow identified the infected pump and concluded that cholera was spread via contaminated water in 1854. Accordingly, infrastructure and available technology in the populous and crowded nineteenth-century cities had created the preconditions for the recurrent outbreaks of infectious diseases that characterized most of that century.Footnote ¹⁵ These outbreaks of cholera alarmed governments all around the Western world and triggered investment in large-scale public works, such as the development of sewage and water systems. As Tarr noticed, however, most of the technological solutions for these pressures, such as new sewage and water systems, created new risks and pressures of their own. Running-water sewages, for instance, created water contamination in rivers and streams, negatively affecting settlements downstream – places previously unaffected.Footnote ¹⁶ Again the technological jump forward created new pressures for regions and cities previously not affected. This build-up of risks shows how infrastructural or technological changes are never implemented on a ‘clean slate’ and that preconditions are hardly ever entirely independent from former hazards and shocks.

Figure 4.1

George Pinwell, ‘Death’s Dispensary,’ appeared in Fun Magazine (London, 1866). Pinwell’s cartoon shows poor people surrounding a water pump that is being controlled by a skeleton or a figure of death, referring to John Snow’s recent discovery about the cause of cholera.

An even clearer example of the interplay between mitigation measures and preconditions is provided by coastal infrastructures along the North Sea shoreline. In the early and high Middle Ages, most communities in this region developed tidal economies. Instead of tackling floods and regulating tidal flows, these societies found ways to co-exist with a tidal landscape and adapt to the marshy and wet conditions. Fishing, salt production, and grazing, using the resources provided by the salt marshes, became the dominant economic activities along the North Sea shores. All these activities benefited from the recurrent seasonal inundations and were unthreatened by frequent storm floods. This co-existence with the marshy landscape required some infrastructural adaptations, however. While some communities benefited from natural elevations in the landscape to build their villages, most had to adjust by creating elevations in the landscape – these mounds known as Wurten in Germany or terpen and wierden in the Low Countries. These mounds could be up to 6 meters above sea level and several hundred meters wide – sometimes encompassing the whole settlement. In this way, houses and warehouses were protected from the recurrent inundations, while the meadows, salt marshes, and creeks remained influenced by the tides.Footnote ¹⁷

Inundated landscapes were not ‘unaltered’ pieces of wilderness either. To make sure the optimal amount of water entered the meadows and salt pans and the water was able to drain at the ideal time, sophisticated water management systems were developed. These systems should not be confused with embankments and drainage works: they managed the flow and prevented an excess of water in bad weather. In the English Fenlands, for example, lodes (derived from the old English gelād, or to lead) and catchwater drains were installed from at least the early tenth century, but probably already by the seventh century. This elaborate system of pipes, canals, and ditches required extensive technical knowledge and the investment of ample time, labor, and capital. This gravity-controlled system regulated inundations and optimized hay production in the meadows.Footnote ¹⁸ In most regions around the North Sea, water management systems which fostered co-existence with floods were gradually replaced by other types of infrastructure which aimed to exclude flooding altogether and to introduce dryland agriculture in wetland environments. Only in some regions, such as the English Fenlands, could the amphibious system persist well into the seventeenth century, although increasingly marginalized by state-sponsored ‘improvement’ projects.Footnote ¹⁹ As these two technological systems served clearly different purposes – accommodating floods versus excluding them – they also produced profoundly different landscapes of risk and disaster.

4.2.2 Economic Pressures and Crises

The view that the pre-existing level of economic development determines the impact of hazards is perhaps most evident in the discourse about disaster vulnerability comparing the ‘developing’ world with the ‘developed’ world. From the nineteenth century onwards, but especially after 1945, disasters increasingly came to be seen as characteristic of a global South characterized by poverty, illiteracy, and backwardness. The West, by contrast, was believed to be largely protected from disasters by its high levels of economic and technological development.Footnote ²⁰ In some regions this belief was supported by the relative infrequency of severe natural disasters for a longer period of time: Switzerland, for instance, experienced such a ‘disaster gap’ in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first three quarters of the twentieth century.Footnote ²¹

There is a certain logic to the idea that economic preconditions, and more particularly poverty and ‘underdevelopment,’ affect hazard prevention, mitigation, and recovery. In affluent countries, higher living standards usually imply better-quality housing, a wider range of options for evacuation and shelter, and insurance to cover the costs of rebuilding after the disaster. Widespread poverty makes all of this much more difficult. In the 1970s, critical geographers like Phil O’Keefe and Ben Wisner framed disasters in the Third World, such as the 1976 Guatemalan Earthquake as ‘classquakes’ produced by underdevelopment and marginalization.Footnote ²² Poverty has also been singled out as the prime driver causing producers to abandon traditional restraints in the exploitation of fragile ecosystems. On the other hand, other scholars warn against the simple association of poverty with overexploitation of resources and exposure to natural hazards, since poor people may develop their own coping strategies to minimize risks or mitigate the impact of natural hazards.Footnote ²³ As well as living standards, public resources also matter: economically advanced countries are better positioned to generate, through taxation, considerable sums to invest in infrastructural works, warning systems, or other high-tech solutions aimed at preventing hazards or mitigating their impact. They may, however, not always be willing to do so. A variety of motives – ideological, political, social, economic – can prevent them from prioritizing hazard protection over other goals. Alternatively, they may be roused into raising expenditure only when it is too late, as the state of the levees in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina suggests.

Economic development is not the only way in which economic preconditions may affect the impact of shocks, as the characteristics and structure of the economy – at local, regional, or national level – should also be taken into account. We focus here on three interrelated aspects: intensification, diversification, and commercialization. Even before the Industrial Revolution, intensification can often be linked to an increased exposure to natural hazards. In the eighteenth century, Europe was repeatedly afflicted by cattle plague, for instance, and its diffusion was directly connected to the intensification of the long-distance cattle trade in the preceding centuries. Every year, thousands of animals made the journey from their breeding places in Northern and Eastern Europe to the urban consumption centers in Western Europe. The dense concentration of animals provided the conditions for epidemic diseases, the outbreak of which was fostered by the vulnerability of the animals, which were often on the brink of starvation after the long journey West.Footnote ²⁴

Diversification can be seen as a risk-reducing strategy of medieval peasants. By growing multiple crops, cultivating many small plots scattered over a large area, and combining farming with non-agrarian activities such as gathering nuts and berries or cottage industries, the risks of adverse weather and subsequent harvest failure were reduced.Footnote ²⁵ Research on famines in later periods suggests that regions with diversified economies fared better. During the major famine of the early 1590s in Northern Italy, the drop in the number of births in mountainous regions was not nearly as severe as in the lowlands, as mountain populations were able to supplement a grain-based diet with locally sourced dairy products, fruit and vegetables, and chestnuts collected in the woods,Footnote ²⁶ while the extreme dependency of the Irish population on potatoes was one of the factors – although not the only one – contributing to the dramatic impact of the potato blight in Ireland in the 1840s.Footnote ²⁷

The relationship between commercialization and vulnerability to hazards is more complex. On the one hand, in commercialized economies, substantial investments in hazard protection can be facilitated by the existence of markets for capital, labor, and commodities, if this serves the interests of the investors. This was the situation in Holland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when entrepreneurs investing in land reclamations were prepared to fund dikes and drainage systems in the expectation of substantial long-term returns.Footnote ²⁸ Entrepreneurs, rural and urban alike, were not always keen on making large-scale investments in protection and mitigation measures, however. It depended on the time-scale and the economic interests of the entrepreneurs. In Holland farmers were owners of the land and aimed for long-term profits, and as a result, commercialization was not accompanied by environmental pressures.

An unchecked quest for short-term profits, however, is more likely to lead to overexploitation of natural resources or to the neglect of protective elements. Indeed, commercialization can at times also be linked to accumulation practices and the constantly increasing production and consumption of renewable and non-renewable resources. A growing group of scholars has portrayed these economic strategies as clashing with environmental boundaries in a limited world. According to Moore, the spread of capitalism and commercialization created the preconditions for environmental disasters to occur throughout the world. Indeed, scholars from a wide range of disciplines are calling for a moral economy, degrowth, and a return towards commons and subsistence in order to prevent detrimental pressures.Footnote ²⁹ Some historical sand drifts have been considered examples of the detrimental effects of commercialization, and the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s is often taken as a case in point.Footnote ³⁰ Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether it was caused by a lack of environmental knowledge of the region or by the commercialization of grain production.

A related issue concerns the integration of the economy in international or interregional market networks. Open economies, at least in theory, have easier access to commodities and services in other regions, which may help them to cope with hazards and facilitate recovery, as has been a long-standing argument for the relatively early escape from famine in England and the Northern Netherlands.Footnote ³¹ But integration in a network of markets may also result in the removal of scarce resources to other places. Markets, after all, respond not to needs but to purchasing power. The Irish Famine of the middle of the nineteenth century is a case in point again. Food was imported to Ireland, in the form of sizable quantities of maize that arrived directly from America in the spring of 1847. Although this was not enough, it helped to save lives. But in the winter before the maize arrived, grain exports from Ireland to England had taken place in much the same way as they had done before the crisis, “presumably because the poor in Ireland lacked the purchasing power to buy the wheat and oats that were shipped out.”Footnote ³²

While this book does not focus on wars as hazards or disasters in themselves, we should also note that conflict could affect and exacerbate the impact of other environmental hazards. Only in very recent times have we seen how distrust of health workers, clinicians, governments officials, and drivers during Ebola outbreaks in Western Africa – sometimes leading to violence – was connected to pre-existing levels of suspicion and distrust linked to ongoing civil war conditions.Footnote ³³ The difficulties of dealing with hazards during wartime are also seen going back into the pre-industrial past: in medieval Flanders, for example, the Flemish–French war of 1314–15 formed one of the main preconditions for the harvest failures of 1315–17 – caused by excessive rainfall – to turn into a full-blown famine.Footnote ³⁴ In order to finance the war and feed the troops, the Count of Flanders implemented a confiscation policy, redirecting the goods and grain of rebels and political adversaries to the national treasury and army. Most of these confiscations of grain were derived from the front zones in Flanders: the towns of Ypres and Cassel. Other regions escaped relatively lightly and could contribute in cash rather than grain, which was an advantage, given the harvest failures. To make things worse, the provisioning of the army interfered with local grain markets. In areas where troops were stationed, extra grain was purchased, which meant ever lower grain stocks available for the local population. The usual famine mitigation measures of grain imports were prevented as well, since the County of Flanders derived most of its imported grain from the North of France, a trade route now blocked because of impending hostilities. Because of these burdens of war, Ypres and Cassel were the worst-hit regions within the County of Flanders during the Great Famine.

4.3.1 Coordination Systems: The Family, the Market, and the State

All societies require some form of coordination to organize the exchange and allocation of resources. Four main systems can be identified: the family or household, collectives such as local communities and associations, the market, and the state. These systems do not primarily develop with the explicit intention of coping with hazards, shocks, and disasters, but through their sets of political, social, and economic institutions they do affect a society’s capacity to mitigate the impact, recover, or prevent recurrences. With the possible exception of small groups of hunter–gatherers, all societies rely on more than one coordination system at the same time. The exact combination, however, varies widely, both between societies and over time. All these coordination systems have changed fundamentally through time and with varying trends and evolutions over the globe. Processes such as state formation and state failure, the development and demise of formalized collectives, and the shift between the core household and extended family systems have significant repercussions for vulnerability and resilience towards hazards.

When struck by a calamity, many people turn to family members first for basic necessities such as shelter, food, and emotional support. Families can also be instrumental for recovery afterwards. Families are great providers of ‘bonding’ social capital: horizontal ties within homogeneous groups that generate solidarity and reciprocity.Footnote ⁴⁰ Although the European marriage pattern, characterized by a predominance of the neolocal nuclear household, consensual late marriage, and monogamy, has been viewed positively for lowering child mortality rates, raising education, and stimulating economic development,Footnote ⁴¹ its specific impact on vulnerability towards hazards and shocks is unclear in the absence of convincing micro-level research.

On the one hand, as demonstrated by research in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, household size affects evacuation behavior. In New Orleans, high costs and practical problems related to the needs of elderly family members complicated evacuation decisions, and consequently large extended households were more likely to stay behind than small nuclear ones.Footnote ⁴² Extended families, on the other hand, offer other advantages. In the summer of 1994, torrential rains during a typhoon caused a terrible flood in the Beijiang basin in the southern province of Guangdong, China. Although there were no casualties, the flood caused great damage. Summer crops were almost entirely destroyed, and in the city of Qingyuan and the surrounding villages more than 80 percent of the houses collapsed.Footnote ⁴³ Even though aid, in the form of bricks and funds, was provided by donations from Hong Kong, the state was not able to mitigate all effects and propagated self-reliance. Kinship, social networks, and communal ties therefore became crucial. During the rebuilding period the Chinese victims of this great flood relied on these ties not just for food and shelter, but also for loans in order to buy the seed and equipment they needed to resume farming – with extended families acting as a buffer.Footnote ⁴⁴

Marriage patterns could have very different effects on vulnerability levels depending on the strength of marital ties, as is shown by Megan Vaughan’s study of a famine in lowland Nyasaland in 1949. Vaughan stresses that entitlements to food of households are only part of the story: it is also important to look at allocation and distribution of food within the household too. In lowland Nyasaland it was customary for women to marry men from the highlands in the North and West, who would then move to the lowland to live with their wife and her family. In 1949 this custom brought advantages: many husbands made the arduous journey to their relatives in the highland region and were able to bring back food supplies to their wives and children. Others, however, stayed with their relatives until the famine was over, and some even found themselves a new wife in their region of origin, leaving their first spouse destitute.Footnote ⁴⁵ This marriage pattern could thus have very different effects on vulnerability levels, being highly dependent on the strength of the marital ties and the willingness of marital partners to extend relief.

In almost all societies, past and present, yet another coordination system is at work: the market. Commodity markets are usually the first to arise; well-developed markets for land, labor, and capital are, from an historical perspective, not as common.Footnote ⁴⁶ Through their role in allocating resources, the existence and the organization of markets affects the coping capacity of societies during crises. Notably, Amartya Sen’s influential analysis of the Bengal famine of 1943 is largely based on the combined effects of labor and commodity markets. Sen argued that the famine was not a question of insufficient food, but rather of specific groups experiencing insufficient access to food. The reasons for this ‘entitlement decline,’ he claimed, originated partly from ‘market imperfections’ related to wartime inflation, hoarding, and speculation, but also from the fact that the wages of certain occupational groups stagnated, or even fell, while the prices of basic foodstuffs rose.Footnote ⁴⁷

Exactly how markets affect resilience and vulnerability depends, again, on political, social, and economic circumstances. In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century coastal Flanders, growing commercialization in combination with changing property relations gave rise to reduced flood protection. With the increase of urban landownership and the reduction of peasant smallholding, investments in water management fell. Peasants prioritized safety and continuity of their holdings, but absentee urban landlords adapted their strategies to expectations of profitability: they were not eager to step up investments in the maintenance and improvement of dikes, drains, and sluices, as risks were high and returns, in the shape of lease prices, modest.Footnote ⁴⁸ In contrast, in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Holland and Zeeland, urban entrepreneurs were quite willing to invest in equally risky large-scale reclamation and re-embankment projects, and thus contributed to the improvement of flood protection. Investments were stimulated by expectations of substantial profits, but also by the fact that the political power of urban entrepreneurs allowed them to negotiate tax exemptions and thus reduce costs.Footnote ⁴⁹

The last coordination system to be discussed here is often referred to as the ‘state’: a convenient shorthand, but not a very accurate one since various local and regional authorities also reside under this heading. How governmental bodies prepare for and respond to hazards is important; their role in this respect will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 5. Just like family systems or markets, governmental systems may affect the capacity of societies to deal with shocks. In modern societies, individuals have high expectations of government when it comes to disaster management. However, efforts by governments to prepare for shocks or mitigate their impact are not new. Some governments went to considerable trouble to set up warning systems. The thirteenth-century caliphs of Baghdad, for example, maintained a system to warn the city of an impending flood by having the water level of the Tigris measured at a location hundreds of kilometers upstream.Footnote ⁵⁰ Another kind of preparation concerns emergency relief, the organization of which tends to reflect prevailing political and social relations. In Europe, with its tradition of urban self-rule, famine relief was first and foremost a responsibility of town governments. Between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, urban authorities in many parts of the continent, driven at least in part by fear of civil disturbance, established public grain stocks to relieve distress in cities.Footnote ⁵¹ Here, however, the focus is on the conditions created by pre-existing governmental systems not specifically aimed at hazard and disaster management.

The belief that regime type impacts coping capacity is at the heart of Amartya Sen’s claim that democracy provides a safeguard against famines. According to Sen, a free press and political accountability will force authorities to take decisive and timely action to prevent the worst.Footnote ⁵² Other researchers have focused not so much on democracy per se as on specific institutions and practices of good governance found more frequently – but not exclusively – in democratic societies, such as high government capacity, controls on corruption,Footnote ⁵³ effective decentralized government,Footnote ⁵⁴ checks to prevent domination of government by a single interest group, a clear division of responsibilities between governmental bodies,Footnote ⁵⁵ and a combination of political, legal, economic, and social mechanisms and pressures to ensure that mobilization against famine actually takes place.Footnote ⁵⁶

How vulnerability and resilience can be affected by a failure to fulfill these conditions is demonstrated by the famines that occurred in Ethiopia and Sudan in the 1980s. These famines may have been triggered by drought, but they were exacerbated by the lack of political voice among the poorest and by the suppression of the press. Initiatives to address the emerging crises were not sufficiently supported by the government or were used for political goals.Footnote ⁵⁷ In Ethiopia, the dictatorial socialist Dergue regime played a particularly damaging role by imposing heavy grain exactions on the countryside in order to feed the army and the urban population, and especially by the campaign to counter insurgency in the Tigray region. This campaign included the destruction of crops and rural markets, the imposition of restrictions on trade, forced resettlement of people, and the denial of relief to the region.Footnote ⁵⁸

Institutional preconditions can also be influenced by other characteristics of the state than regime type, such as the ideological underpinnings of state power. In early-modern Europe, and increasingly so during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, changing attitudes to the control of nature and the role of knowledge and expertise gave rise to a much more proactive role of the state. A political culture of stewardship induced states to focus on protecting their subjects from the vagaries of nature, as for example in the construction of dikes and retaining walls on the Canal du Midi in seventeenth-century France. Using techniques derived from military engineering, dikes and retaining walls shielded the land from flooding, thus emphasizing the ability of the king to tame the ‘wild weather’ and control the land. This, in turn, reinforced the legitimacy and authority of state power: disaster management and state building went hand in hand.Footnote ⁵⁹ The eighteenth century shows us the first examples of state intervention based on the compilation of ‘scientific data,’ as in eradication policy in several European states to deal with rinderpest, or the reconstruction of Lisbon after the earthquake of 1755.Footnote ⁶⁰ Underneath this discourse of the ‘common good,’ severe differences of opinion could be present, as in the case of the drainage of the Fens in England, where the state’s desire for control over nature clashed with the local population’s survival mechanisms.Footnote ⁶¹ Whether heightened state intervention is seen as a success story or as more efficient is therefore clearly in the eye of the beholder.

In the modern era centralization of political power, expanding state resources, and the rise of the welfare state have contributed to a vigorous increase of state intervention in disaster management. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, when new ‘professional’ disaster relief organizations, such as the Red Cross, started to operate alongside private philanthropic networks, the state was still largely absent. The Cold War era marked the rise of national civil defense in the Western world, as the threat of air raids and particularly of nuclear attack grew. The legal framework this created played its part in the emergence of national disaster management and relief schemes.Footnote ⁶² International disaster relief schemes emerged from the 1970s onwards, as the UN was increasingly criticized for its lack of organized response when disasters struck in developing countries. The United Nations Disaster Relief Organization (UNDRO) was established in 1971/72, and disaster relief and management became a prerequisite at the national level for member states as well.Footnote ⁶³ For the same reasons, however, the chances of governments becoming part of the problem instead of its solution have also increased. International disaster relief has also received fierce criticism, as relief organizations often end up empowering authoritarian regimes and disempowering victims, linking up with Sen’s focus on the importance of democracy and political contract.

4.3.2 Institutions for Collective Action and the Commons

The family, the market, and the state are the three most familiar coordination systems, but in many societies their role was complemented by other forms of cooperation and collective action – sometimes assuming a prominent role in relation to hazards and shocks. Family resources to deal with hazards, for example, were often restricted by their size, scope, and capacity to last, and thus relief strategies were often supplemented by coping mechanisms that relied on collective action: various forms of cooperation between individuals and households. Here, another type of social capital comes into focus: bridging social capital links people from different social backgrounds, giving them access to assets from a wider segment of society.Footnote ⁶⁴

Cooperation and coordination are not always institutionalized: informal networks, for instance between kin or neighbors, may also perform these functions. For some scholars, however, formalized collective action in particular is a vital component of risk reduction vis-à-vis hazards. This is argued for pre-industrial Northwestern Europe, where the nuclear household was the basic family unit from the Middle Ages onwards. In what has been labeled the ‘Silent Revolution,’ from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries onwards, collective action became formally institutionalized in organizations such as commons, guilds, fraternities, water boards, and beguinages, in order to reduce risks, share costs, and offer broader welfare and protection opportunities.Footnote ⁶⁵ These institutions offered solidarity, where vulnerable community members received aid to secure their livelihood. Guilds, for instance, could protect small entrepreneurs from fluctuating markets and volatile prices.Footnote ⁶⁶ Beguinages provided a secure life for single women, surrounded and supported both by blood-kin and by non-relatives.Footnote ⁶⁷ Religious or civic poor relief organizations funded by charity offered support to those unable to provide for themselves: the poor, the sick or handicapped, the elderly – even if in comparison with modern welfare states the levels of assistance provided by these institutions were modest.Footnote ⁶⁸

Most institutions for collective action were not primarily established for the purpose of managing hazards or the ensuing disasters. Instead, they addressed structural issues, which indirectly impacted levels of vulnerability and resilience. During famines, for instance, poor relief organizations faced a growing demand for assistance: people who survived on the edges of subsistence in normal times were threatened when food prices peaked. In the sixteenth-century Southern Low Countries, food distribution by the ‘poor tables,’ organizations run by members of the local community, increased significantly during major food crises. Nevertheless, context mattered: distributions were more forthcoming in regions with a more equitable distribution of power and wealth, as a broader base of people donated to the system in normal years as a form of ‘collective insurance.’Footnote ⁶⁹ However, financial reserves of poor relief organizations were often limited, as was their ability to raise additional funds, especially during times of general hardship. Many of them were therefore unable to sustain significantly raised levels of expenditure over a long period.Footnote ⁷⁰

Notably, in several countries – most notably (rural) France and Spain – institutionalized relief during famines was almost entirely absent. In the French countryside, food security was often guaranteed by the communal practice of gleaning.Footnote ⁷¹ Outside of Europe, famine aid also often took shape in different ways: in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century India, for example, the common form was individual giving by well-to-do landowners or merchants in the form of food, alms, or work. This kind of charity was frowned upon by the British, who objected to its indiscriminate character: they feared it would pauperize people and make them dependent on aid permanently. This thinking was very much in tune with the developments in Great Britain itself, where the 1834 Poor Law, prohibiting outdoor relief in favor of the Victorian workhouses, was even more focused on labor control than earlier legislation.Footnote ⁷² Yet, with the rise of civil society in the late nineteenth century, indigenous Indian famine relief was partly transformed as voluntary local committees emerged to raise funds, start kitchens, or organize work projects.Footnote ⁷³ Overall, however, the impact of formalized relief must not be overstated – even in Western Europe. While some forms of collective action were successful in lowering vulnerability levels, others had only a minor impact on the members of the collective.

Among the institutions for collective action, commons deserve special attention: they have been seen as an effective institutional framework for reducing vulnerability by limiting environmental degradation and offering buffers against, for instance, soil erosion and sand drifts.Footnote ⁷⁴ In some contexts, arable agriculture was organized collectively. Open fields, a basic system of scattering of arable plots across a number of fields, offered a number of risk-limitation possibilities: preventing certain landholders from monopolizing the most fertile soils, spreading the risk of drainage problems and overall crop failure, and equitably distributing the distances needed to walk from settlement to fields. This kind of tactic is still seen around the globe today in peasant societies. Another form of commons was the shared, but rationed and regulated, access to rights and obligations over non-arable resources such as pastures, forests, wastes, and marshes. Such rights have been seen as an important form of welfare or protection for pre-modern rural inhabitants, especially if they had little access to arable land, and could benefit from the right to graze animals, to pick herbs, fruit and fungi, to hunt and fish, and to extract fuel and building materials such as dung, timber, and peat.Footnote ⁷⁵

The idea that the commons could bring about reductions in societal vulnerabilities has not always been accepted. The most influential and widely cited critic was ecologist Garrett Hardin, whose story of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ argued for a number of dangers – in particular the problem of avaricious individuals acting in self-interest who would eventually deplete finite common resources or goods.Footnote ⁷⁶ This would eventually lead to a ‘tragedy of the commons,’ in the form of soil degradation, a shift of the ecological stability domain, or a subsistence crisis because of a lack of natural resources. However, in more recent times, the commons as an effective tool for managing resources has been re-established by scholars pointing to the fact that the use of common resources was normally regulated and sanctioned.Footnote ⁷⁷ In many cases formal restrictions applied, dictating how much of a resource could be used, and, more importantly, by whom. In that sense, commons were no ‘free-for-all’ doomed to ruin by greedy individuals, but instead were complex, multi-layered, adaptable, and often exclusionary.Footnote ⁷⁸ The fact that evidence exists for societies throughout history passionately defending their collective rights to different resources points to a system that continued to offer many people a large number of real benefits in terms of reducing vulnerabilities.Footnote ⁷⁹

The disintegration of the commons – in various parts of Europe basically complete by the nineteenth century – is now often interpreted as a negative development, especially for the poor, who were more reliant on these resources. There is a parallel in the contemporary world, where the poor are disproportionately dependent on the commons in developing and underdeveloped countries.Footnote ⁸⁰ Also, many scholars point to a rise in vulnerability levels more generally after the decline of forms of collective action, as has happened in current-day African wetlands, where the loss of traditional rights to fishing as a common property resource has eroded the livelihoods of local communities.Footnote ⁸¹ The privatization of commons has even been labeled as (common) land grabbing and resource grabbing. Where communities in Morocco and Ghana were hitherto able to cope with periods of crisis thanks to access to communal land and collective grazing, the privatization of those communal resources and the abolition of collective action significantly impacted on their level of vulnerability to hazards and crises.Footnote ⁸²

The increasing realization now is that the potential for collective action in general and the commons in particular, both past and present, to reduce vulnerabilities stands somewhere between the completely negative views of Hardin or the ‘Enlightenment reformers’ and the wholly positive interpretations now being spun by those working directly within the ‘commons’ or ‘collective action’ sub-fields. For the pre-industrial period at least, it would be wrong to think that the commons were equitably divided and the poor always had sufficient access to welfare and protection components.Footnote ⁸³ In fact, historically speaking, this was more the exception than the rule. Indeed, mirroring broader inequalities across societies in general, especially as we move into the early-modern period, we find commons as part of restrictive access regimes, with highly stratified access and fear of encroachment by outsiders.Footnote ⁸⁴

Indeed, within the commons, access to collective rights could be attached to privileged farms or families, acceptance or integration into the community, length of residence or lineage, or payment of license fees, or related to ownership of private land and livestock.Footnote ⁸⁵ That is to say, accumulation of land could also mean a decreasing number of residents with actual access to the commons or a say in how they functioned. Increasing levels of inequality could thus be detrimental to the good performance of commons, manifesting themselves in ecological problems such as the seventeenth-century sand drift that destroyed the village of Santon Downham and clogged the nearby river in the English Brecklands.Footnote ⁸⁶ Parallels can be seen with highly stratified and exclusionary access to other collective institutions. Decision-making in medieval water boards, for instance, was traditionally restricted to landowners, and in the Flemish coastal area, for example, this category originally included a large segment of the region’s population. However, from the thirteenth century onwards, when smallholding made way for tenant farming, the water boards of the Flemish coastal area were increasingly dominated by absentee landlords, while local peasants were hardly represented at all. The result was a decline in investments in water management, ultimately giving rise to increased vulnerability to flooding.Footnote ⁸⁷ In general, therefore, the historical evidence suggests that there is a link between collective action and a reduction in vulnerability – although still more important for the outcome was the particular socio-political context in which the collective institution operated.