Floods, natural imaginaries and social conflict. The controversy on the management of floods of the Ebro

Abstract

There is a symbolic-cultural influence in the development of the “natural disasters”, and specifically of the floods: that of the dominant conception of the nature-society duality. The research of disasters involves analyzing the social creation of vulnerability. In this regard, there is controversy among the different anthropological approaches about the consequences and effectiveness of structural resistance strategies, compared with those of accommodative adaptation, as ways of dealing with such vulnerability. This controversy spins around the ambiguous concept of resilience (resilience and / or adaptive capacity). After reviewing the positions, an eclectic employment of resilience is sustained, in the line of encourage the active and territorially discretional development of Resilience-Recovery-Adaptation capacities. In relation to this theoretical approach, I introduce the study of Ebro river floods, and the causal process by which its rate of return, and the destructive effects on vital resources of riparian populations, have increased dramatically since the turn of the millennium.