Sharing responsibility in disaster management policy

The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction delivers internationally agreed upon norms for disaster risk reduction, engendered in part through shared-responsibility, and subsequently adopted by Australia. However, it has been contended that shared-responsibility in Australia is a partially articulated social contract. Through targeted engagement with the works of Foucault, a combination of document analysis on selected disaster risk reduction policies and employing a taxonomy of obligations of shared-responsibility, we investigate if shared-responsibility signifies the failure of dominant disaster management discourses to articulate concrete responsibilities. We identify that an incomplete normalisation process is in part responsible for partial articulation. (C) 2020 Published by Elsevier Ltd.