Second, government agencies are often among the first actors involved in disaster relief operations, as the neutrality, commitment, and effectiveness of the bureaucracy and military are crucial for ensuring swift delivery of food aid, population transfer from affected areas, as well as repair to damaged health, irrigation and transportation infrastructure. On the other hand, where local officials are corrupt, funds allocated by international donor organizations and central government agencies for disaster relief are likely to be diverted to private ends, and fail to be disbursed to the affected areas (Martin and Taher 2002).

Besides quality of government, we should expect a range of informal institutions are also relevant to the capacity of vulnerable populations to withstand natural disaster risks. For example, several authors have highlighted the importance of ‘social capital’, understood as the ‘norms and networks that enable people to act collectively’ (Woolcock and Narayan 2000) upon the vulnerability of populations to climate risks. Where there are strong local community support networks, in theory people should be able to weather the impact of natural disasters better and be able to recover faster following the event, by pooling welfare risks and cooperating in reconstruction tasks. Adger (2003), for example, argues that social capital is an indispensable precondition to adapting to the effects of global climate change, citing the example of successful adaptation in protecting marine areas in Trinidad and Tobago (Brown et al. 2001, Brown, Tompkins and Adger 2002, Tompkins, Adger and Brown 2002).

Finally, a growing literature focuses on the nature of social institutions, not only within the community, but also within the household. Neumayer and Plümper (2007), for example, provide the latest in a range of studies showing a distinctly gendered pattern to natural disaster impact, and that natural disasters lower the life expectancy of women more than that of men. They also show that in societies where women have higher socioeconomic status (SES), this effect is less, and therefore that the overall effect of natural disaster upon mortality rates is reduced. The implication is that norms of gender inclusion are important social determinants of natural disaster resilience.

# **Data**

As a measure of success and failure at managing the effects of climate change, we take the rate of deaths from natural disaster events – that is, the per capita number of deaths arising from floods, heat-waves, tsunami, and earthquakes – for the period 1995-2005. Our source for this measure is the EM-DAT database published by the World Health Organization (WHO 2008), a joint project with the Centre for Research on Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, which records all events where either 10 people were killed; 100 people were reported affected; there was a call for international assistance; or declaration of a state of emergency. The data used covers the period from 1995-2005, inclusive, from which a single measure is constructed taking an average across the entire decade. In addition, to further ensure that the regression is robust to the inclusion of any individual outlier (high impact disaster) cases, 6