Policy implications and lessons learned: the political economy of disaster risk financing

This briefing note highlights the complex policy landscape of approaches to move towards more anticipatory, pre-agreed disaster financing and response. It summarises key findings and recommendations for practitioners in the field. Moving towards more anticipatory, pre-agreed disaster financing and response is a shared goal for many in the disaster response and humanitarian sectors.

The particular mechanisms which facilitate this shift are varied, but what they have in common is enabling decision-makers to enact disaster response based on information about potential disaster risk, rather than waiting for humanitarian need to become apparent. This shift is what opens the potential for much more effective disaster response, but it also poses challenges for practitioners around interpretation and decision-making processes.