Island countries are more vulnerable to government oppression after natural disasters – according to new research – and there are concerns that the increased frequency of weather-related events due to the climate crisis, could see the further rise of autocracies around the world.
The research, published this month in the Journal of Development Economics, examined data from 47 small island countries, including in the Pacific, south-east Asia and the Caribbean, from 1950-2020 to estimate the relationship between extreme weather events, such as cyclones and severe storms, and the level of democracy in a country.
Researchers used the Polity2 measure – an internationally recognised measurement that ranks countries on a scale from absolute non-democracy to mature democracy – to examine the impact of a severe weather events on democratic freedoms.
They found that on average, the Polity2 measure dropped about 25% in the seven years after a storm shock, with an initial 4.25% fall in the year after a storm shock, with civil liberties, political liberties and freedom of association and expression all affected.
Mehmet Ulubaşoğlu, a professor of economics at Deakin University Australia, and one of the co-authors of the paper, said that in the wake of a natural disaster there can often be “sort of a mutually agreed oppression” between a government and population.
“The government steps in to provide relief assistance, but they also see this as a window of opportunity to oppress citizens … The government buys a social licence to oppress because it’s providing disaster assistance, political liberties are restricted, civil liberties are restricted, that’s the chain of events,” he said.
Ulubaşoğlu and his co-authors, Muhammad Habibur Rham and Nejat Anbarci, said their findings went some way to explaining why storm-prone small island countries around the world, such as Haiti, Fiji and the Philippines, have remained politically repressed over a long period.
“Storms have become regular, they keep repeating, there’s sort of perpetuity. You cannot really hold your head up as citizens, because by the time you start to recover from the storm there’ll be another storm and it starts again,” he said.
He added that the situation could worsen due to the climate crisis.
“Climate change induces more frequent and severe natural shocks,” he said. “Human lives are lost, properties are lost, infrastructure is affected, but there are also political implications, these shocks strike the political system as well. That’s the overarching lesson here.”
Ulubaşoğlu said the deployment of the military in the wake of a natural disaster often served to erode democratic practices in the countries.
“The military is obviously trained for these emergencies and many countries around the world use them in disaster situations. But the issue is how to get them back to their barracks after the disasters. These storm autocrats seem to be taking this disaster militarism to the next level.”
Dr Meg Keen, the director of the Pacific Island Program at the Lowy Institute in Australia, said that other factors had more of a bearing on the push for centralised power structures in the Pacific, citing coups, elections, political struggles and geopolitics.
“The erosion of democracy in some parts of the Pacific with respect to media freedoms, and accountability and transparency of government has more to do with variables external to disasters; although climate disasters do magnify pre-existing governance weaknesses, without a doubt,” she said.
Keen added that in a country like Fiji, which was highlighted in Ulubaşoğlu’s research, there was a strong push from non-government organisations (NGOs) to create more inclusive response mechanisms to disasters. “These organisations may not have won the day yet, but they are advancing.”
The research focused on small island countries (those with a surface area of less than 1m sq km) because disaster events there tended to affect the entire country, rather than small regions in them. It looked at the impact of “storm shocks” – which included cyclones, hurricanes and tornadoes – that had resulted in one of the following: 10 or more deaths, 100 people affected, the declaration of a state of emergency or a call for international assistance.
Ulubaşoğlu said one issue affecting storm-prone island countries was that many of them had become independent only in the past 50 or 60 years, and therefore may have less robust constitutions or weaker social contracts between government and citizens.
The research also raised the question of the obligations of international partners in providing disaster relief. While other forms of overseas development assistance are often linked to improvements in governance and the strengthening of democratic values, disaster relief funding, which often comes with no strings attached, had at times been “the funding source of the oppression”, said Ulubaşoğlu.
