Abstract

Latin America Countries suffer from a huge variety of the wrongly named Natural Disasters, damages and losses are especially significant in poor countries affecting mainly the poor segments of their societies. Disaster consequences are covered throughout several risk transfer processes, uninsured poor population in developing countries usually are covered with external resources, -named relief aid- in the aftermath of officially declared disasters. The aid is transferred as grants and loans with the purpose of attending disaster s cost and, in a lower proportion, to avoid them, or mitigate their potential impact.

Even though international concern tends to focus on large scale disasters, there are thousands of small forgotten disasters each year connected with recurring and normal natural phenomena, people living at risk in the local dimension are outside of strategies oriented to release that risk in absence of officially declared disasters.

This paper tries to describe the empirical tendencies followed by international cooperation and Local Authorities in terms of their cooperative effort in risk management investments. Using game theory, a kind of prisoner s dilemma is presented as the paradigmatic outcome of self-interested, rational behavior not leading to a socially optimal result from those both players efforts, which is the absence of strategies focused on reducing the actual risk people suffer.

As a second step, this paper explores the possibility of introducing a strategy of international cooperation, local authority and community participation, in order to overcome inefficient situations inside a logic of long term development.