ABSTRACT
Disaster events often generate a ‘blank slate’ where new opportunities arise for national and local governments to re-appropriate land and other natural resources and allocate them to various actors within the tourism industry, often in opaque transactions that lack due diligence and accountability. This chapter examines various cases of ‘disaster capitalism’, whereby corporations and governments have forged alliances to turn ‘crisis into opportunity’ and dispossess disaster-affected communities. This includes the aftermath of 1998 Hurricane Mitch in Honduras, the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake and Tsunami in Thailand, the 2010 Earthquake in Haiti, and the 2013 super-typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. Yet disaster capitalism often encounters fierce resistance from local communities that can take a variety of forms and yield different degrees of success.
