Blurred Responsibilities of Disaster Governance: The American Red Cross in the US and Haiti

The influence of private actors, such as non-profit organizations (NPOs) and firms, has been increasing in disaster governance. Previous literature has interrogated the responsibilities of states towards citizens in disasters, but the roles of private actors have been insufficiently challenged. The article politicizes the entangled relations between NPOs, states, and disaster-affected people. It proposes the Rawlsian division of moral labor as a useful, normative framework for inter-rogating the justice of disaster governance arrangements in which ‘liberal’ states are involved. Liberal states have two types of responsibilities in disasters: humanitarian and political. The humanitarian responsibilities imply provision of basic resources needed for the capacity to make autonomous choices (domestically and abroad), while the political responsibilities imply provision of the institutions needed for the liberal democratic citizenship (domestically). Through this analytical lens and building on the wealth of existing scholarship, we illustrate the disaster governance role of the American Red Cross in the United States (a 2005 hurricane) and in Haiti (the 2010 earthquake). Where, in Rawlsian terms, United States is interpreted as a ‘liberal’ society, Haiti is framed as a ‘burdened’ society. The article proposes five points to consider in analyzing disaster governance arrangements under neoliberal regimes, structured around the division of humanitarian and political responsibilities. The article illustrates how NPOS are instrumental in blurring the boundaries between human-itarian and political responsibilities. This might result ultimately in actual vulnerabilities remaining unaddressed. While the Rawlsian approach challenges the privatization and lack of coordination in disaster governance, it is limited in analyzing the political construction of ‘burdened’ societies.


Introduction
Many hazard types, from floods to nuclear tests, are either created or influenced by humans, and their dev-astating and unequal consequences to human lives are mostly anthropogenic (Kelman, 2018).The question of who is affected by a disaster, and in which manner, is mediated by societal structures, built over extensive periods of time (Oliver-Smith, 2010).While it might be impossible to imagine contemporary societies entirely without disaster risk, this should not divert political attention away from the severe inequalities of disaster impacts.Vulnerability in face of disasters reflects people's marginalization in society (Gaillard, 2010;Watts & Bohle, 1993).Politically marginalized places, communities and groups, such as informal settlements, distant rural regions and minority groups tend to be most severely affected by disasters-and neglected in their wake (Cupples & Glynn, 2014;Pelling & Dill, 2010).
The inequalities of disaster governance are not only manifested in who is affected, but also by who is not affected.Unequal disaster risk is produced through processes that enable certain groups of people to "minimize negative environmental externalities and appropriate positive environmental externalities in particular places" (Collins, 2010, p. 258).The lack of capacity in the face of disaster is often less a reflection of resources but rather their inherently unequal distribution (Gaillard, 2010).Thus, disasters can expose the societal structures and institutions, rather than merely disrupting them (Guggenheim, 2014).Through accelerating or revealing the adverse course of the status quo, they might also provide a "critical juncture" to contest the political, economic, and cultural establishment (Pelling & Dill, 2010, p. 22).
In terms of such establishments, the nation-state continues to control vast part of the world's resources and impose territorial control.Simultaneously, the political economic practices that follow neoliberalism have resulted in a rollback of states' efforts to protect their citizens, recasting the state as a protector of processes of capital accumulation (Ferguson, 2010).Neoliberalism is here seen as a "theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade" (Harvey, 2007, p. 2).While states are recognized as key actors throughout the phases of disaster governance-from mitigation and preparedness, through response to recovery-the role of private actors in disaster governance has been increasing (Meriläinen, 2020).
Non-governmental organizations and non-profits are private actors expected to gear their operations towards the public good without a motive of profit (Lewis & Kanji, 2009).In this article we refer to non-profit organizations (NPOs), but the discussion applies generally to a variety of humanitarian and civil society organizations.These actors are construed as 'associations' by Rawls (2005), serving the essential purposes of human life but being excluded from the realm of political responsibility.Our interest lies with organizations inhabiting the space between the sphere of citizens and the sphere of state, and between the individualized provision of the market and the collectivized provision of the government (cf.Wagner, 2012).Within a neoliberal gover-nance framework, such organizations are often assumed to step in when states do not allocate resources, and when commercial organizations are not able to operate profitably.
When NPOs take on an activity that typically associates with state responsibilities-such as providing health care or disaster shelters-they are not clearly and primarily accountable to the citizens at large (Banerjee, 2014;O'Brien, Hayward, & Berkes, 2009).While there have been calls for increased accountability of NPOs, the accountability is likely to manifest towards donors and other partners (Chowdhury, 2017) rather than the disaster-affected people.The calls for increased accountability of NPOs have mainly amounted to further instrumentalization of assistance (Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance [ALNAP], 2015).While a state's mandate in disaster governance can be contested, an NPOs' mandate is humanitarian, framed outside the realm of everyday politics.Yet large humanitarian actors have been criticized for ignoring local efforts by, e.g., excluding national governments from the coordination of humanitarian assistance (Aly, 2016).
Our intention here is to bring the political more visibly into focus in relation to NPOs involved in disaster governance.In particular, we focus on the entangled relations and roles of NPOs, states, and the disaster-affected people that the former two are purported to support.In order to interrogate the political roles of NPOs entangled with liberal states, we build on Rawlsian thinking about the division of moral labor between the state, nonprofits, and for-profit firms (Cordelli, 2012;Mäkinen & Kasanen, 2016;Mäkinen & Kourula, 2012) in the setting of contemporary disaster governance.From a Rawlsian perspective, liberal states have two types of responsibilities in disasters: humanitarian responsibilities and political responsibilities.Humanitarian responsibilities imply provisioning humanitarian aid domestically and abroad, while political responsibilities refer to securing capacities required for liberal citizenship domestically (Voice, 2016), while allowing 'burdened' societies to make autonomous political choices.
Through the analytical lens of division of moral labor we explore the role of the American Red Cross (ARC) in relation to a 2005 hurricane in the US and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.Rather than providing original indepth case studies on the ARC and the two disasters, we draw on pre-existing literature to illustrate a scenario of the NPO's role in disaster governance.We start from a Rawlsian position that frames the US as a 'liberal' society (a constitutional democracy where laws and statutes must be consistent with certain fundamental rights and liberties) and Haiti as a non-liberal 'burdened' society (facing historical, social, and economic circumstances that inhibit reaching a situation where the citizens recognize the basic structures as just; Rawls, 2001).As a national Red Cross organization, the ARC is "independent of government, and…based in the communities [it] serve[s]" (International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, 2005), and its operations depend on volunteers, donations, and tax-exempt status.Hence, the ARC is here framed as an NPO, which in Rawlsian terms would count as an association entangled with the 'liberal' US society.
The article contributes to disaster studies by challenging the contemporary neoliberal disaster governance through the normative Rawlsian framework with an embedded emphasis on social justice, while also centering NPOs as political actors potentially entangled with the political agendas of a state.This is done through a five-point list that shows how neoliberal disaster governance may change the organization of society and the basic boundaries between the different spheres of society in a politically significant manner.Furthermore, we inform the Rawlsian perspective by sharpening its terminology with respect to vulnerability and expanding the framework's scope to better account for NPOs' increasingly political role.
The following and second section of the article presents an ideal Rawlsian approach to disaster governance, emphasizing moral division of labor.The section highlights both how the Rawlsian disaster governance challenges contemporary neoliberal disaster governance, but also discusses its limitations in doing so.The third section illustrates the division of moral labor in disaster governance following the US hurricane and the Haiti earthquake through a focus on the ARC, and the final section concludes the article.

Rawlsian Division of Moral Labor and Disaster Governance
Neoliberalism as a regime of policies and practices in Harvey's (2007) sense involves the deployment of market-based techniques of government, and the construction of 'responsibilized' citizens that produce governmental results without direct state intervention (Ferguson, 2010).Neoliberal regimes have also shaped the disaster governance policy and practice.
Manifestations include the roll-back of state responsibilities from people's wellbeing in disasters (Jones & Vasvani, 2017), and associated expectations on disaster-affected individuals and communities, to exhibit 'resilience' involving manifestations of agency and self-sufficiency (Chandler, 2016;Grove, 2014).Meanwhile, examples of the roll-out of the state are the increased securitization/militarization of humanitarian relief abroad with the intent of securing neoliberal regimes in post-disaster settings (Pyles, Svistova, & Ahn., 2017), and government zoning and demolition of public housing projects in the wake of disasters (Arena, 2011).Connected to these developments, private actors, such as firms and NPOs, have an increasing influence on how resources in disaster governance are mobilized and used (Meriläinen, 2020;O'Brien et al., 2009).
While social contracts have been evoked in literature on climate change and disaster governance, particularly to explore state-society relations, their analytical potential remains underexplored (Blackburn & Pelling, 2018).Through applying the Rawlsian perspective, we respond to the call to explore the multiplicity of social contracts and interrogate the responsibility of private actors as part of disaster governance arrangements (Blackburn & Pelling, 2018).While other works have explored disaster justice in place (e.g., Huang, 2018) and taken also normative philosophical stances to disasters (e.g., for the utilitarian stance, see Byskov, 2020), we contribute to the discussion on disasters and justice by placing the entangled relations of NPOs, states, and disaster-affected people at the center of inquiry.
In the following four sections we outline what disaster governance studies can gain through applying a Rawlsian perspective, particularly in terms of the moral division of labor.First, we explore what a Rawlsian division of moral labor would look like when applied to disaster governance taking place in liberal societies.Second, we explore the disaster governance responsibilities of liberal states in disasters unfolding in burdened societies.Thirdly, we develop a five-point list on the ways in which the Rawlsian division of moral labor challenges the contemporary neoliberal disaster governance.Finally, we conclude by bringing up critiques and problems with a Rawlsian perspective to disaster governance.

Division of Moral Labor in the Context of Disaster Governance in Liberal Societies
Rawls identifies three central properties of an ideal, liberal state: 1) A democratic government that is 'reasonably just' and serves peoples' 'fundamental interests' (Rawls, 1999, p. 17).2) Citizens having 'common sympathies' towards each other (Rawls, 1999, p. 23). 3) Citizens having "a firm attachment to a political (moral) conception of right and justice" (Rawls, 1999, p. 24).
The division of moral labor is key to achieving these three properties.It refers to responsibilities over how various political dimensions of society are divided between different institutions and actors (Rawls, 2005).The division of moral labor outlines a just basic structure of society (i.e., the system of major political institutions) to secure just background conditions.Within these structures, individuals and associations have the space to advance their ends effectively, without a constant need to take care of the background justice (Rawls, 2005, p. 269).Without the political control and design of the basic structure, the power concentrates in capitalism over time and people will lose their freedom (Rawls, 2005, pp. 267-269).On the Rawlsian account, "a disaster occurs when the background institutions that support and maintain citizens' capacities for moral and political agency are signifi-cantly compromised" (Voice, 2016, p. 396).According to the Rawlsian division of moral labor, the liberal state has a humanitarian responsibility to provide its citizens the essentials of human existence needed for moral agency, such as nutrition, security, social relations, information, and freedom.It also has the political responsibility to secure the resources for liberal citizenship.Importantly, humanitarian responsibility is understood to be a prerequisite for political responsibility.Political responsibility implies, for instance, upholding the institutions needed for free and equal political participation, as well as realizing equal civil, political, and economic rights.Thus, a major task of the Rawlsian disaster governance within liberal societies is to reform and/or rebuild the institutional structures needed for political citizenship (Rawls, 2001;Voice, 2016).
Following the Rawlsian division of moral labor, the public responsibilities of justice cannot be privatized or fully delegated to private actors.These associations are meant to be voluntary organizations and they lack the institutional capacity and political mandate to realize the equal civil, political, and economic rights.As such, they cannot perform the moral labor expected from the basicstructure institutions.In this setting, the NPOs and firms are supposed to operate on principles and aims related to their civic and economic roles in a society.The basicstructure institutions of the state, on the other hand, regulate and steer the activities of firms and associations to ensure that they contribute to social justice more broadly.A central tenet is that government should be in control of its public responsibilities of justice and not privatize the associated tasks and powers to the firms and NPOs operating on a voluntary basis (Rawls, 2005, pp. 267-269).
A Rawlsian approach to disaster governance focuses on the division of responsibilities between the public institutional structures and private actors such as NPOs and for-profit firms.It emphasizes the major public tasks of state institutions since the basic responsibilities of justice arise in social co-operation that takes place within the common basic structures of society.In disaster governance, NPOs as voluntary organizations can focus on the humanitarian responsibility (moral agency), but also produce liberal citizenship within the confines of state institutions.According to Rawls (2001, pp. 5-8) citizens in liberal democratic settings are collectively responsible via democratic processes for the fairness of this structure regulating the division of burdens and advantages in their own societies.However, in disasters, the fairness of the basic structure of society is often jeopardized (or its injustices are revealed) and citizens lose their abilities to use their basic rights of citizenship that would allow them to control the basic terms of their social co-operation.

Disaster Governance Responsibilities of Liberal States in Burdened Societies
Rawls' division of moral labor is particularly apt for discussing the ideals of disaster governance within liberal societies.However, in the transnational context of contemporary disaster governance, the framework is also helpful in interrogating the ideal disaster governance responsibilities of liberal states with respect to disasters unfolding in 'burdened' societies.
Rawls' category of 'burdened' society refers to societies facing "historical, social, and economic circumstances that make achieving a well-ordered regime difficult if not impossible" (Rawls, 1999, p. 90).The 'wellordered society' depicts a situation where citizens recognize the basic structures as just (Rawls 1999, p. 63).From the Rawlsian perspective, burdened societies face a political history that makes independent governance of the society extremely challenging.Furthermore, according to Rawls they might lack the "human capital and knowhow" and the "material and technical resources" needed to manage their own affairs well (Rawls, 1999, p. 106).
According to a Rawlsian perspective, liberal states have responsibilities of humanity towards all members of humankind (Nagel, 2005).Thus, they have the humanitarian responsibility to provide disaster-affected people of burdened societies the essentials of normal human functioning (Rawls, 1999).However, liberal states have neither political responsibility nor mandate to steer the development of burdened states towards liberal basic structures.Rather, the political responsibility of the liberal state is to offer a burdened society a real choice to manage its own affairs well.This implies offering resources to the actors in a burdened society needed for the independent governance of society.Taking the division of moral labor seriously, the liberal state would need to consider the root causes that undermine political responsibility (political, cultural, colonial history, lack of resources) in a burdened society.It is particularly important to consider how the liberal state itself might be responsible for these structural vulnerabilities.
Rawls maintains that also in the setting of a burdened society, the liberal state can assign associations (such as NPOs) humanitarian responsibilities, and these organizations can offer assistance on the basis of duties of charity (see Valentini, 2013).However, these actors should stay within the bounds of humanitarian responsibilities and remain out of political institution-building.A responsible liberal state would not try to liberalize burdened societies in disaster settings via private actors.The primary political responsibilities for the institutional issues of political citizenship belong to the domestic political authorities in the burdened societies facing a disaster.For Rawls, the basic political responsibility of a liberal society is to offer resources for burdened societies to make autonomous political choices in these settings.

A Division of Moral Labor in Neoliberal Disaster Governance
In the Rawlsian account, a disaster is foremost a humanitarian crisis jeopardizing peoples' moral agency, i.e., capacity to make autonomous choices, and secondly a political crisis that challenges peoples' abilities to function as responsible liberal democratic citizens.Unlike a neoliberal proposition for disaster governance, with its focus on resilient individuals and communities (Chandler, 2016), the Rawlsian approach focuses on the institutional backgrounds that might enable agency and resilient self-organization.For Rawls, in the case of disasters, states should primarily be responsible for supporting their citizens' resources to function as moral persons and free and equal citizens.Thus, Rawlsian states are not primarily frames for global economic activities, and disasters are not just an economic crisis or opportunity.For Voice (2016), as a matter of political definition, disasters challenge the basic structures of societies and the institutional backgrounds of moral agency and liberal democratic citizenship.
We see a perspective building on a Rawlsian division of moral labor as relevant for analyzing and challenging how contemporary neoliberal approaches to disaster governance alter the division between the political and humanitarian responsibility.Based on our reading of Rawls (see also Mäkinen & Kasanen, 2016;Mäkinen & Kourula, 2012), we suggest five relevant points to consider when analyzing disaster governance in a neoliberal setting: 1) Political responsibility can be lost when basic political responsibilities of the state are privatized and delegated to NPOs and firms.
2) The humanitarian responsibility can be lost as a disaster offers an opportunity to nationalize and extend the political control of the state into the traditional areas of private life.
3) The location of the basic institutional boundaries between the public and private spheres of society may be blurred, sharpened, or changed, which may change the division of political and humanitarian responsibility.4) Empty spaces of responsibility between the political and humanitarian responsibility may be produced or filled in a way that some people (i.e., the politically marginalized members of society) are increasingly excluded or included in a society.5) There may be a situation of overlapping of humanitarian and political responsibility where the different institutions, organizations, and individual actors operate without coordination or separation of their roles and tasks.
Thus, the division of moral labor helps making visible multiple possible political implications of neoliberal disaster governance.

Limitations of the Division of Moral Labor in Challenging Neoliberal Disaster Governance
We recognize Rawls' theory as an 'ideal theory of justice,' and with that a need for some adaptation for its use particularly in burdened societies.Firstly, a Rawlsian approach to disaster governance alone provides insufficient attention to historically-built structural vulnerabilities across various scales.A lack of capacities in the face of disaster is often less a reflection of resources but rather their inherently unequal distribution (Gaillard, 2010).This also links to the debate between a Rawlsian social primary goods approach and Sen's and Nussbaum's capabilities approach to the question of metrics of justice (c.f.Robeyns & Brighouse, 2010).
While not positing to solve this debate, as an adaptation we suggest a shift of focus from the availability of resources to capacities to cope with damage from disasters (Gibb, 2018).
Secondly, building on these observations about vulnerability, one issue with Rawls' focus on categories for societies (from 'liberal' to 'burdened') is that they apply statically on state-level.This takes the analytical attention away from the processes of marginalization, within and across borders, that result in an uneven allocation of disaster risk (c.f.Collins, 2010).For instance, while a society might be labelled 'liberal,' it is highly likely that the marginalized members of that society do not see the government as 'reasonably just' and serving their 'fundamental interests' (Rawls, 1999, pp. 23-24, 90, 106).Meanwhile, the label 'burdened' might be stuck on a society that did not become burdened on its own but was made into one as part of another nation or empire altogether.Climate change will also further challenge the notion of a social contract connected to a single state (O'Brien et al., 2009).It is also useful to keep in mind the Marxian critique of Rawls (c.f.Harvey, 1973) asserting that Rawls' liberal theory of justice does not sufficiently account for questions of the role of capitalism and private property in the creation of injustice (Drozdz, 2014).
Thirdly, the Rawlsian approach also holds a focus on citizens, rather than people more broadly.The disasteraffected people are likely to be marginalized in and across societies.The marginalized also tend to lack citizenship at various scales: whether that means statelessness (e.g., Rohingya; see Ahmed et al., 2018) or informality (e.g., Meriläinen, Fougère, & Piotrowicz, 2020).Siddiqi and Canuday (2018) illustrate that, when scrutinizing social contracts in case of disasters, one should not start with the static notion of a state, but rather foreground people's experience of citizenship.That might mean observing, as the authors do, how the state-citizenship contract and its inequalities weather a disaster relatively unscathed (Siddiqi & Canuday, 2018).
In summary and keeping the above critiques in mind, the Rawlsian liberal state represents the collective responsibility of its citizens.In the case of a disaster in a liberal society, the state has a humanitarian responsibility to provide the citizens the essential capacities needed for human existence.It also has the political responsibility to secure the capacities of liberal citizenship, which involves reforming and/or rebuilding the domestic institutional structure needed for free and equal citizenship.
Humanitarian responsibility is the prerequisite for political responsibility.Of the two responsibilities, humanitarian responsibility is the one that can be delegated to NPOs and firms, when the activities of these associations are regulated by the institutions of the state.While liberal states have a humanitarian responsibility towards burdened states facing a disaster, they have neither the political responsibility nor mandate to provide institutions needed for the equal civil, political, and economic rights.Liberal democracies need to respect the political autonomy of the societies that lack the will or capacity to create and maintain liberal democratic political institutions.Disasters are not to be seen as a political opportunity to liberalize burdened societies (Rawls, 1999).

Exploring the Political and Humanitarian Responsibility of the American Red Cross
In many ways, the Red Cross epitomizes the humanitarianism and disaster aid discourse.The movement consists of the International Committee of the Red Cross coordinating humanitarian aid in wars, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies coordinating disaster aid, and 190 national organizations collecting donations, initiating aid, and training staff (Johansson, 2017).The ARC is one of the national organizations existing between the 'voluntary' realm and the state (Irwin, 2013).While being privately funded and staffed, the organization has close ties with US government (Irwin, 2013).The ARC is a disaster-relief partner of the Federal Emergency Response Agency (FEMA) and it has a close governmental association (Groscurth, 2011), including the president of US acting as its honorary chairman who holds the power to appoint political nominees to various functions in ARC's governance (ARC, n.d.).This while ARC at the same time frames its activities through principles of impartiality, neutrality, and independence.
ARC and its involvement in disaster governance provide a relevant illustration of an NPO that, in a Rawlsian sense, reshapes basic institutional boundaries between the public and private and changes the division of moral labor in the societies it operates in.The Rawlsian analytical frame brings out how the public responsibilities of justice in the setting of liberal society can be altered.The ARC can undermine the political responsibilities of the state and create tensions between the political and humanitarian responsibilities.A Rawlsian framing shows how the liberal state can turn its duty to assist a burdened society in managing its own affairs well into the policy where a burdened society is made increasingly dependent on the assistance activities of hybrid organizations like the ARC.These actors blur the boundaries between the political and humanitarian responsibility as the humanitarian responsibility is increasingly politicized and the political responsibility is increasingly privatized.In this section we will examine closer ARC's role in changing the divisions of moral labor through two illustrations of disaster governance following a hurricane in the US (2005) and the earthquake in Haiti (2010).

Hurricane 2005, New Orleans, US
In 2005 a hurricane (Katrina) produced a storm surge that cracked the poorly maintained levees protecting the bowl-like city of New Orleans that lays below the sea level (Yarnal, 2007).Altogether, 2000 people lost their lives and millions were left homeless in the aftermath (ARC, 2016).The impacts were unequally distributed, with marginalized black populations suffering the harshest impacts across the phases of disaster governance (Yarnal, 2007).In preparedness, the public support was inadequate in scope and the marginalized lacked the personal resources to evacuate-resulting in them facing the disaster directly, together with the response from the emergency services (Yarnal, 2007).
The recovery further exacerbated the pre-existing inequalities.The black populations living in poverty were not only likely to have suffered the direct impacts of the hurricane, they were also less likely to have afforded insurances, or possessed the economic and social capital needed to negotiate bureaucracies and more easily recover their lives (Masozera, Bailey, & Kerchner, 2007).While they did exhibit agency, relying on community and God, they were interpreted by observers as lacking independence and control over their fates, a model of agency exhibited and afforded by, particularly, the white middle-classes (Stephens, Hamedani, Markus, Bergsieker, & Eloul, 2009).While the disaster continues to be (re)mediated in the shifting media landscape, in the aftermath the racialized disaster-affected people were framed "blameworthy, irresponsible and failed citizens who pathologically insisted on staying put despite public warnings to evacuate" (Cupples & Glynn, 2014, p. 368).Additionally, the communal and cultural life of the Tremé neighborhood, once "one of the most prosperous and politically active black communities" in the US, was heavily hit by the disaster and its governance (Allen & Maret, 2011, p. 116).In Rawlsian terms, the disaster governance efforts produced empty spaces of responsibility.The marginalized members of the society facing the disaster were depicted as exhibiting the wrong kind of citizenship and agency, which in turn supposedly justified the absence of political responsibility.
The US governmental response was heavily criticized.While issues were raised regarding the federal, state, and local governments' roles separately, it was particularly FEMA that might have been able to make a difference once the hurricane was unfolding (see Roberts, 2006).The organization had previously had an all-hazards, allphases mandate, but since 2001 the organization had been disintegrating, and its area of responsibility had been decentralized (Roberts, 2006).The 2005 hurricane overwhelmed the local public administration and it took several days for the federal response to kick in (Schneider, 2005).Meanwhile, the US also struggled to receive aid offered by other states (Kelman, 2007).In the reconstruction phase, the large governmental programs for housing were seen to be failing at bringing the locals back home, due to lack of trust in citizens and inappropriately cumbersome procedures (Allen & Maret, 2011).In recovery planning, commercial interests were placed ahead of the wellbeing of the city's (pre-hurricane) residents: For instance, public housing projects such as Lafitte were to be demolished and privatized (Barrios, 2011).People were turning to various actors for support, including NPOs, religious groups, and even small governmental actors (Allen & Maret, 2011).It is clear that following the 2005 hurricane, disaster governance was privatized through delegating it to firms and NPOs.In this process, overlaps between different scales of government and among various private and non-state actors were being created.
A focus on the ARC helps to further explore the ways in which NPOs were altering the moral division of labor in disaster governance.In 2010, the ARC seemed to be closing the case of the 2005 hurricanes (Rita and Wilma in addition to Katrina).The organization stated having provided both emergency response (e.g., 1,400 emergency shelters and 68 million hot meals), and a recovery program ("planning and advocacy services" for 13,200 families, and "mental health or substance abuse treatment" for 22,500 people; ARC, 2010a, p. 2).The ARC highlights that it is not a government agency and hence depends on donations and volunteer labor (ARC, 2010b).Furthermore, the organization argues that "some disasters are so big that no agency-government or nonprofit-can do it all" (ARC, 2010b), framing government as one agency among many.
The success of ARC, apparently, lies in partnerships: particularly in those forged between the nonprofit and corporate actors.The ARC CEO Gail McGovern and a Business Roundtable's representative co-authored in 2010 an article entitled "Corporate and Nonprofit Collaboration Is the Best Recipe for Disaster Response," highlighting how cross-sector and public-private partnerships should be in place already in the disaster preparedness phase (McGovern & Dan, 2010).The corporate sector is hailed as the source of resources and (volunteer) labor, with the article making a link between an association of 180+ CEOs and on-the-ground disaster relief expertise (McGovern & Dan, 2010).While the ARC argues they have since 2005 "improved coordination with local and state governments, as well as with the federal governments and FEMA" (ARC, 2010a, p. 5), the role of the public sector seems like an afterthought amidst the calls for partnerships.However, against the background of ARC's ties with the US state, the organization's communication and activities can be seen to blur the boundaries between political and humanitarian responsibilities.

Earthquake 2010, Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Framing Haiti as a 'burdened' society necessitates contextualizing it within a transnational (post)colonial regime that has systematically undermined the Haitian government's ability to provide humanitarian and political responsibilities to the majority of its population (Concannon & Lindstrom, 2011).Haiti became independent in 1804, as people enslaved by the French rebelled (Oliver-Smith, 2010).The 20th century saw various national and transnational elites consolidate power through exclusion, exploitation, and violence (Hallward, 2010).Haiti is considered one of the first nations to be controlled through financial colonialism, forced to comply with the governing strategies of foreign (liberal) creditor nations.The (post)colonial history and its material inheritance is ever-present in Haiti, and for decades prior to the earthquake the state was already known as "the NPO republic" (Fatton, 2011).Tens of thousands of NPOs partnering with transnational financial institutions had been channeling development and humanitarian aid to the society rattled by "structural adjustment programs" (Fatton, 2011).This background served to naturalize how seamlessly the moral division of labor was reorganized during the post-disaster response of the 2010 earthquake.
When a shallow magnitude 7.0 Mw earthquake shook Haiti in 2010, the human losses and suffering were immense in a society of 10 million people.According to the varying estimates, the death count following the earthquake ranges between 46,000 and 300,000 (Associated Press, 2011), while 1,5 million people were injured and 895,000-1,5 million people were forced to move into temporary camps, where hundreds of thousands of people continued to live years after the earthquake.Beyond the direct human suffering, the material and economic losses (at 7,8 billion USD) are estimated to have exceeded Haiti's GDP in the year 2009 (Ramachandran & Walz, 2015).
The earthquake damaged the state's capacities to carry out political responsibilities as almost all government buildings were destroyed, and as a result Haiti's government was ham-strung in its post-disaster response.The transnational community was fairly quick to respond, with the US government disbursing almost 2 billion USD and pledging over 3 billion USD for relief and reconstruction (Ramachandran & Walz, 2015).But this was hardly an example of an ideal response from a liberal state in terms of acting upon its humanitarian responsibility towards a burdened society.In an unprecedented move, the Haitian parliament was asked to dissolve itself to make way for the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission, which was co-chaired by former US president Bill Clinton and Jean Bellerive, Prime Minister of Haiti (Schuller, 2017).This arrangement was legitimized by calls from transnational donors to guarantee the "oversight and accountability in the rebuilding process" (Delva, 2010).As Fatton (2011) points out, the idea of transforming Haiti into a de facto trusteeship is not new, but the earthquake in combination with the rise of humanitarian interventionism enabled its quick and largely uncontested realization.
Analyzing the response to the Haiti earthquake through a Rawlsian framing of moral division of labor shows that the 2010 earthquake, if not completely altered, then at least blurred the division of political and humanitarian responsibility.Transnational assistance sidestepped the state structures of Haiti, with less than 1% of transnational aid going through the government of Haiti, and instead going through multilateral agencies and transnational NPOs (Minn, 2017), such as the ARC.The US government did not disburse any of its humanitarian aid to the Haitian government (Ramachandran & Walz, 2015).In the US ARC was still recovering from heavy critique following the handling of Katrina.The ARC saw the Haiti's earthquake a "a spectacular fundraising opportunity" (Elliot & Sullivan, 2015), with the organization able to erase a 100 million USD deficit through continuing to fundraise far beyond the calculated need (Elliot & Sullivan, 2015).This over-fundraising also contributed to further losing political responsibility as the ARC outsourced a number of projects to other transnational NPOs (Elliot & Sullivan, 2015).Concannon andLindstrom (2011, p. 1147) point to how Haiti was treated by liberal states as "a charity case" rather than as a space where humanitarian responsibilities exist and guide interventions.
Humanitarian responsibility was further lost as the local Haitian NPOs were almost completely sidestepped in the distribution of post-disaster relief funds by transnational donors.Such a division had been solidified through decades of strategic use of development and humanitarian aid for the political aims of other nations, not least the US, which had used aid to Haiti to leverage compliance with US foreign policy (Elliot & Sullivan, 2015).At the same time, as Minn (2017, p. 210) points out, it is questionable if the Haitian state has ever adequately addressed the needs of its population through basic structures and institutional capacities.According to Minn (2017, p. 210 drawing on Trouillot, 1990): The racial, social and geographic hierarchies have led to the majority of the Haitian population existing on the margins of the state apparatus, while the urban elite who have had access to government have primarily used it as a means for personal financial gain.The Haitian state today has inherited a legacy of weak institutions, high rates of professional emigration and limited avenues for generating revenue.
In this context, the ARC and other foreign NPOs on the one hand clearly contribute to further privatizing political responsibility by creating a parallel system of basic structures, but on the other hand they also fill a void of a lack of public services.The earthquake itself greatly harmed the already weak state-administrative capacities and institutions, but this was further exacerbated by the strategic transnational donations that promoted humanitarian responsibilities on the expense of political responsibilities and thus ended up further weaken-ing Haiti's basic institutions (Zanotti, 2010).At the same time, the complex and intimate relations between the ARC and the US government ensured that disaster governance in Haiti was not simply a matter of a neoliberal roll-back of the state, either in terms of political or humanitarian responsibility.Humanitarian responsibility was unclear as on the streets of Port-au Prince US military was a visible element, as US troops flew in aid and evacuated foreigners while remaining autonomous and not under UN command (Pyles et al., 2017).Minn (2017, p. 211) shows how the humanitarian discourse, as embodied by the ARC, produces and reproduces "an idealized dyad of generous donor and needy recipient," which is not contextualized in the state structures of most of the Global South.Aid workers did not consider the government of Haiti to be a "worthy recipient of aid" in and of itself, and its reliability as an intermediary for aid was also constantly questioned.
Following our Rawlsian framing, the post-disaster response to Haiti with its extreme skewing of aid through transnational NPOs served to create a situation of not only overlapping, but conflictual relations between political and humanitarian responsibilities.This was visible in how foreign donors' concerns often did not align with identified government priorities, e.g., transportation sector pledges exceeded government requests by 510%, while the Haitian government's request for strengthening democratic institutions fell short by 80% (Ramachandran & Walz, 2015, p. 8).The extreme concentration of aid flows to transnational NPOs also arguably meant that the NPOs asserted more influence over local politics than the local population (Loewenstein, 2015;Zanotti, 2010).From the perspective of the local populations in Haiti, the regimes of disaster governance served to further blur the spaces of responsibility and the situation of overlapping political and humanitarian responsibilities, where "[h]umanitarian, development, and peacekeeping agendas become intertwined and, at least from a ground-up point-of-view, largely indistinguishable" (Wagner, 2014, p. 244).

Concluding Discussion
In this article we have discussed the role of private actors, NPOs in particular, as part of disaster governance.We framed our analysis through a Rawlsian framework on the division of moral labor, which implies that liberal states have two types of responsibilities in disaster governance: political and humanitarian.Political responsibility constitutes the provision of institutions needed for the liberal citizenship, while humanitarian responsibility involves supporting the provision of nutrition, security, social relations, information, and freedom that are needed for the moral agency (Voice, 2016).
According to the Rawlsian perspective, liberal states' primary responsibilities in disaster governance consist of supporting the citizens of liberal democracies facing a disaster through: (1) humanitarian aid, and (2) liberal demo-cratic institution building.Liberal states also have humanitarian responsibilities towards citizens of burdened societies, but they lack political responsibilities and mandate.That is, liberal states have a duty to provide humanitarian necessities and resources, but they should not interfere in the internal politics nor strive to create liberal democratic institutions.Rather, liberal states should support political institution building by the burdened societies without the political and economic strings attached.The aim of the liberal democratic assistance should be to support burdened societies governing their own political and socio-economic affairs and at the same time respect the political self-determination of citizens of burdened societies.While humanitarian responsibilities can be delegated to specialized private organizations such as NPOs or firms, political responsibilities should remain real and in the hands of states.
In the illustrations of the article, the ARC is seen as an NPO that a liberal democratic state (US) has delegated disaster governance responsibilities to.From the Rawlsian perspective, those responsibilities should be humanitarian, not political.However, scrutinizing the arrangements between the ARC and the state (US) in relation to the two disasters discussed reveals how the realities of those arrangements fall short of the Rawlsian ideal.The organization is not operating simply on a voluntary basis within the basic structure of the society, but the organization is very much entangled with the US state (Groscurth, 2011;Irwin, 2013).
Following the hurricane of 2005, but also prior to it, the 'liberal' US should have carried: (1) the political responsibility of securing political institutions that liberal citizenship rests upon, as well as the (2) humanitarian responsibility for the moral agency of its citizens.The lack of safe infrastructure, appropriate public evacuation measures, and reconstruction prioritizing commercial interests, all point out to how across the phases of disaster governance the capacities of the marginalized populations were hampered by the ways in which the division of moral labor was organized.In terms of our five-point Rawlsian list, it seems that before, during, and after the hurricane of 2005 in the US, the political responsibility was privatized towards non-profits and businesses.This implies a situation where the marginalized US citizens affected by the hurricane were losing their political citizenship and becoming increasingly dependent on the humanitarian support of the NPOs, religious groups, and the like.In the disaster governance arrangements, the ARC represents the blurring of boundaries between the sphere of citizens and the sphere of state since the hybrid organization is operating on both sides of the boundary.Such disaster governance arrangements relying heavily on private actors may lead to the situation of overlapping humanitarian and political responsibility where the different states, private actors, and disaster-affected people operate without the coordination or separation of their roles and tasks.
Meanwhile, in the case of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the US should have given their support to the 'burdened' Haitian state, while assisting in humanitarian ways and staying out of the politics of liberal institution building.This obviously did not happen, as Haiti on US's behest was turned into a virtual trusteeship.These actions should be contextualized in the active postindependence involvement by the US in Haitian politics which contributed to the inability of Haitian government to assume its political responsibilities.In the disaster governance arrangements that unfolded after the 2010 earthquake, the ARC contributed to the mixing and blurring of the boundaries between political and humanitarian responsibilities.From the Rawlsian perspective this type of system of overlapping responsibilities leads easily to major problems.In this setting, the political responsibilities are delegated to NPOs and firms lacking the political mandate and institutional resources to take care of these responsibilities.Furthermore, these political roles and tasks distract the NPOs from their primary humanitarian responsibilities.Disaster governance arrangements where humanitarian responsibility is politicized and political responsibility privatized have various adverse effects, as they: (1) leave marginalized people vulnerable, (2) transform NPOs into political agents of liberal governments and undermine the trust in their political neutrality, and (3) make the political structures of the host countries of the disasters more burdened in the process.
In the case of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the Marxist critique of Rawls (c.f. Harvey, 1973) is relevant.The critique argues that the Rawls' liberal theory of justice takes insufficiently into account questions regarding the role of capitalism and private property in the creation of injustice (Drozdz, 2014).For example, the debts levied by liberal states after Haiti's independence have continued to severely impoverish the society, keeping Haiti dependent on its creditors, including the US and transnational financial institutions (Oliver-Smith, 2010;Schuller, 2017).While taking the division of moral labor seriously would imply that liberal states would consider their part in constructing the structural vulnerabilities facing 'burdened' societies, the Rawlsian approach shows limited attention to such historical and political perspectives.Furthermore, the focus on state and related citizenship embedded in Rawls' thinking will become increasingly problematic amidst climate change (O'Brien et al., 2009) and in cases where those most marginalized are framed outside national citizenship (c.f.Ahmed et al., 2018).Furthermore, the primacy of states in disaster governance is challenged by multi-actor governance arrangements unfolding on various scales.However, as states still exert significant control over the people and resources in their territories, it makes sense to interrogate the contemporary political, economic, and cultural establishment with states serving as the starting point (Pelling & Dill, 2010).
This article has contributed to the disaster studies literature by politicizing NPOs' involvement in disaster governance arrangements (see Blackburn & Pelling, 2018) and by challenging the contemporary neoliberal disaster governance through a Rawlsian framework, contributing thus to normative political philosophical approaches to disasters (c.f.Byskov, 2020).However, we believe there is room for further research that is more attuned, for instance, to how the humanitarian and political responsibilities shift across the phases of disasters.Furthermore, while the division of moral labor framework is apt for challenging disaster governance arrangements in which 'liberal' states are involved, further decolonial disaster research (c.f.Siddiqi & Canuday, 2018) interrogating the (lack of) justice or rights in transnational disaster governance arrangements would be highly important.