Abstract:
Sri Lanka is experiencing an increasing trend of disasters for few decades like many other countries in
the world. Number of affected people and properties damaged by disasters like tsunami, floods,
landslides and droughts within past few decades are significant. Sri Lanka Disaster Management Act
which isthe basic law of disaster management mechanism in the country is not strong enough to manage
increasing disaster risk through the government stakeholder agencies because of no specified and
mandated roles and responsibilities for stakeholder agencies by the act or any other rules and
regulations. Although the National Council for Disaster Management (NCDM) and the Disaster
Management Centre (DMC) has taken some initiatives for disaster management through various
stakeholder agencies at national, district, divisional and local level, still it remains to identify the level
of disaster risk in the country at community level based on scientific method. All the mitigation and
preparedness projects should be identified and implemented based on the level of risk according to the
priority. Disaster management is a multidisciplinary approach and all the stakeholders should be
assigned their duties by rules and regulations. The objective of the study was to identify the gaps of
government mechanism of Sri Lanka in managing disasters and to find better initiatives of some other
countries. Primary and secondary data were used for the study and descriptive analysis was done to
find the results.
KEYWORDS: Disaster management, Stakeholders, Roles and
