SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The development progress achieved by many countries, and particularly by low-income countries, is at risk of being undermined or even wiped out by the range of shocks and resulting crises they face. Since the turn of the millennium, there has been growing recognition of the importance of climate and disaster risks for development progress; the global financial crisis of 2007/08 also had profound implications for economies around the world. Partly in response to this experience, anticipatory risk management systems have become an increasingly popular approach to tackling both economic and disaster resilience. This chapter examines the impacts of financial crises on development at the national level and the responses of major international institutions in terms of coping with and anticipating such shocks. It then examines the lessons from these risk management mechanisms for understanding and recognising the dividends of resilience emerging from disaster risk management.