Security of Global Port Cities Conference
April 30-May 2, 2008

Models of Participation and Forces of Exclusion: Surviving Environmental and Industrial Disaster

(Lessie Jo, Frazier, Steve Koester, Gregory Button, David Jan Cowan, Icaro Aronovich da Cunha, and Monica Schoch-Spana)

Lessie Jo Frazier
Assistant Professor: Gender Studies
Indiana University
Memorial Hall East, 130
Bloomington, IN
(812) 856-0402
frazierl@indiana.edu

New Geographies in Historical and Ethnographic Perspective

The main focus of my research has been the nothern Chilean port city Iquique on the ways in which its status as a frontier territory has intensified and made more evident human rights problems evident for the country and region more broadly. For examples, issues of military occupation and strategic investment, drug interdiction/trafficking dynamic since at least the 1960s, and the place of the free-trade zone in transnational arms and monetary transactions (including 'al Quaida). I bring this close-to-the-shore historical and ethnographic perspective to thinking about what is new in current geographic mappings of transnational economic and political flows and what kinds of methodologies can elucidate particular geographic and political registers.

Steve Koester
Anthropology and Health and Behavioral Sciences
University of Colorado—Denver
303.556.6795
Steve.Koester@cudenver.edu

From the Margins: West Indian Perspectives on Globalization and Security

What does "port security" mean to people whose lives depend on the sea, and specifically to small scale fishermen like those in the West Indies?  They likely interpret security as being able to survive in a global economy that has completely marginalized them. With the  list of other components of their household economic strategies (e.g. neoliberal trade policies have devastated the island's banana industry), tourist development and marine parks have limited their access to  the coastal environment and global warming is already having adverse effects on both inshore and deep sea species they formerly depended upon.  Their marginalization has even pushed some fishermen into the regional drug trade as traffickers. This is readily apparent in both St. Lucia and St. Vincent, and the consequences have been tragic. This paper will explore “port security” through the lives of individuals who define their trade and linkages to globalization from a margin.

Gregory Button
Dept. of Anthropology
University of Tennessee at Knoxville
gbutton@utk.edu

The Need for a Genuine Participatory Approach to Addressing Vulnerability in Coastal Communities

In order to achieve an accurate assessment of a community’s vulnerability, and develop the capacity to effectively prevent, mitigate, and respond to both natural and unnatural hazards, researchers and policy makers must employ a participatory approach that provides community members from all sectors of society to be directly involved in the process of vulnerability assessment and reduction. Such an approach needs to acknowledge the efficacy of local knowledge and promote the capacity of local residents and their organizations to be directly involved in all stages of the process in a transparent manner that recognizes the benefits of local knowledge and the contribution of a community’s social resources.

David Jan Cowan
Engineering and Technology, IUPUI
jancowa@iupui.edu

Shelter from the Storm: A Case Study in Community Security

The security of global port cities is tied to the welfare of its people and the communities that make up these cities. This is tested and re-evaluated when this security is threatened. 
The wrath of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans laid bare the security and welfare of many New Orleans’ communities. The stories of survival and rebirth now being told are testaments to how new, safe neighborhoods can be wrought out of grassroots strategic planning and creative solutions. There are many lessons to be learned from this human struggle to rebuild, reclaim and begin anew.

One of the more successful post-Katrina communities in New Orleans is Broadmoor.  Targeted by civic officials to become a green space, this community and its visionary leaders have risen from little to become a model of community redevelopment across the nation. Coupled with this is the rebuilding of a community that must present itself as a safe haven to those reconsidering this neighborhood as permanent shelter.

What has worked in Broadmoor and what hasn't?  What particular strategies have enabled this community to rise above the Katrina rubble and blight to lay claim to new livelihoods and ways of harmonious living? What will make this community safe, secure and sustainable?

It is the intent of this presentation to discuss some of the strategies and creative plans that have led to the successful redevelopment of this small community set within this world famous port city.

Icaro Aronovich da Cunha 
Catholic University of Santos 
icarocunha@unisantos.edu.br

Social Management of Environmental Risks in Port Areas
(translation by S. Kane)

Petroleum and gas operations depend on a technical network that integrates the port areas of Santos and São Sebatião and links them by ductwork to other ports of production in the Southeast and Central-West of Brazil.

The amplification of energy operations generates new challenges for the environmental management of the Petrobrás system, on the one hand, and the work of government agencies, on the other. Interacting federal organizations, the state and town halls are, as a rule, less prepared to administer and control the complex territorial transformations caused by these activities. Port authorities are structuring environmental management plans in a process that involves the community groups who are exposed to risks; a public that emerges as a relevant actor in the face of the tendency to recognize the necessity of participatory management plans.

This discussion is based on work prepared as a response to environmental accidents in both ports, oriented by Plan APELL (Awareness and Preparedness for Emergencies at Local Level), of the Environmental Program of the United Nations.

Monica Schoch-Spana
Senior Associate with the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC)
School of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases. 
schoml@UPMC.EDU

Model Citizenship in the Management of Public Health Emergencies – The Role of Open Government

Improvements in the ability to handle both emergent and familiar health threats depend upon deliberate planning for the smart flow of information among officials and with the public. The new field of public health preparedness has been predisposed towards a "closed" system in which political leaders and their health, safety, and security advisors—at all levels of government—have defined the direction of health emergency management policies and plans without sufficient input from the populations they seek to protect. Under these conditions, the citizen role in helping remedy health disasters has been very circumscribed, leaving undeveloped any broad understanding of, or institutionalized mechanisms for tapping the valuable contributions of citizens and civil society throughout the complete disaster cycle. To help remedy this deficit, this paper describes and illustrates a continuum of public-spirited contributions that civic groups and individuals can make to health emergency management, and it calls for a model program that would establish and sustain "community engagement" as the national standard for state and local health emergency planning.