Roles and Responsibilities of Government Stakeholder Agencies in Managing Disasters – Reviewing Sri Lankan Experience

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