Engendering disaster risk management and resilience-building: The significance of the everyday in evaluations of the exceptional

This article argues for greater consideration of 'the everyday' within evaluations of 'the exceptional' and presents this as a practical means of engendering disaster risk reduction and management (DRRM) and resilience building. Building on scholarship from feminist geography, gender and development and feminist political ecology, it charts a new way of theorising disaster risk and resilience from a gendered perspective through the analytic of the everyday, and substantiates this with findings from ethnographic research conducted between 2016 and 2017 in disaster-prone informal settlements in the Philippines. As this case reveals, a focus on the everyday helps to uncover the multiple subjective embodiments of risk and insecurity and the structural systems that underpin related inequalities and exclusions. Crucially, the lens of 'the everyday' also exposes the social reproductive labours and power hierarchies embedded in community-based DRRM and resilience-building programmes; insights which are vital to advancing more inclusive, sustainable and socially just approaches to disaster risk governance and climate change adaptation.