Adaptive Disaster Governance in Southeast Asia: Lessons from Multi-Hazard Risk Management Practices

Abstract

Southeast Asia stands as one of the world's most disaster-exposed regions, with six of its eleven nations consistently ranking among the top twenty countries globally by disaster risk index. The region's distinctive governance landscape—characterized by diverse political systems, varying administrative capacities, shared river basins and maritime disaster corridors, and overlapping institutional frameworks including ASEAN's Agreement on Disaster Management and Emergency Response (AADMER)—creates both unique challenges and unique opportunities for adaptive disaster governance. This comparative study analyzes disaster governance systems across five Southeast Asian nations—Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, and Myanmar—through a structured comparative case study design examining governance responses to 47 major multi-hazard events during 2015–2023. Employing a governance fitness assessment framework adapted from the OECD Disaster Risk Governance framework and augmented with adaptive governance theory, the study evaluates governance performance across five dimensions: institutional coherence, multi-level coordination, community engagement, learning and adaptation, and cross-border cooperation. Key findings demonstrate that governance fitness scores—composite measures across the five dimensions—predict disaster outcome quality (measured by mortality, displacement, and economic loss per unit of hazard intensity) with R² = 0.67, confirming that governance quality is a powerful predictor of disaster outcomes independent of hazard characteristics. Among the five governance dimensions, learning and adaptation capacity shows the strongest individual predictive power for outcome quality (β = 0.41), yet is consistently the weakest dimension across all five countries (mean score 42.3/100). Three governance archetypes are identified in the data: centralized adaptive (Vietnam, Thailand—strong central coordination with improving flexibility), polycentric adaptive (Philippines, Indonesia—complex multi-actor governance with uneven learning), and fragile adaptive (Myanmar—governance disruption severely limiting adaptive capacity). Cross-border disaster governance under AADMER has improved but remains limited by sovereignty concerns, inconsistent early warning information sharing, and insufficient pre-positioned regional response resources. An Adaptive Disaster Governance Framework for Southeast Asia (ADGFSA) is proposed, providing region-specific guidance for governance reform.