Disaster management, spatial planning and regional development

Abstract

In March 2013, weather conditions (extreme snow storm) in Hungary were such that they exposed the weakness of co-operation between disaster management, spatial planning and regional development institutions and planning. The ineffective management of the situation by the territorial units and professional (police, fire brigade, etc.) organisations caused such a chaos on some of the Hungarian motorways that thousands of people had to wait long hours (in some cases, up to 40 hours) in their cars, under the snow, for rescue units to reach them. Their areas of responsibility either overlapped or were totally incongruent. If the plans of a motorway would provide for parallel swaths of land on both sides of the motorway (which they don’t due to financial constraints – which in turn are an issue of regional development and spatial planning) so that hedges protecting against snow-drift could be planted, the snow could not pile up so high on motorways. If the various organisations had co-operated better or at all, both rescue efforts and disaster prevention would have been more effective.

A wider understanding of the definition of security has become increasingly accepted in security theory recently. It focuses no longer only on military-related risks but also on other risk components. These can be identified in the spheres of social, ecological and economic security which have been systematised and categorised precisely by the science of security based on the characteristics of the various risks.

This study aims to demonstrate that although the actors of security policy (NATO, EU, USA, United Kingdom, Hungary) have accepted the wider understanding of their security strategies, they do not try to deal with these new risks and do not even define who will be responsible for which development activity.

It is obvious that neither regional development plans recognise or admit the importance of these otherwise generally considered necessary elements of security policy to be developed. As security among EU horizontal objectives is being raised, more valid and more complex development plans can be drawn up, because the validity of interference can be strengthened with a new point of view and the already available set of tools for security policy can be included for the benefit of further development.

The connection between security policy and regional sciences can be made by disaster management. In this field “civil” spatial units and security risks can be integrated. This article is intended to contribute to building stronger connections between the three fields.