مجله مدیریت مخاطرات محیطی
سال دوم شماره 3 (پاییز 1394)

Widespread social hazards include a wide range of problems and dilemmas that each of them can cause undesirable effects on various aspects of human individual and social life as well as its different values and rights. History, Background and literature of identifying hazards in rights can be explored in two historic and contemporary parts. In historic period, one can study two approaches of nineteenth and twentieth century. As the first theoretician in this field, Durkheim while criticizing Lombroso’s opinions on determinism of crime occurrence and criminal’s inner orientation toward crime, suggested that crime is the product of the societies where one of its organizations is faced with troubles. In the following and with an attitude toward opinions and doctrines raised in twentieth century, socialism theoreticians believed that crime is the result of capitalism, social injustices and unfair distribution of wealth. Hence, they believed in a kind of economic determinism. Another remarkable approach was social reaction criminology. In this doctrine, crime controlling and combating institutions were also discussed and studies were directed from victims and criminals toward the institutions. Ultimately, radical criminology, in an ideological form, established a discussion of crime beyond the debates ruling in criminal law systems and opened a way for more radical views in twenty one century. The contemporary approach with a new point of view toward hazards, by emphasizing more clearly on what was mentioned before under the ideas of gemologists, and by criticizing strongly the limited definition of crime, suggested that the reason of many difficulties and hazards in human life is the behaviors leading to these hazards, behaviors that has never been considered properly in criminal law and has never been criminalized. So, they believed instead of studying crime, the social hazards should be discussed. Hence, the ideas raised by this doctrine can be introduced as a clear example of studying hazards in laws.

Following to criminological schools especially radical criminology, one can introduce zemiology as a school in 21st century which attempts to define the roots of many criminal laws deficiencies and failure of criminology in curbing and controlling crimes as the limitation and constricts of criminology and to replace pure attention to crime with attention to broad social harms and hazards and behaviors which lead to it. One can look for behaviors which lead into hazards in broad circle of behaviors as the origination of some difficulties and disorders broadly in a serious and macro level and, in many cases, they leave damages too heavier than conventional crimes. The first step in this way is to provide a comprehensive and thorough definition on abovementioned behaviors which open the doors to recognize the nature of behaviors capable to enter into this circle. All these cases would pave the way to recognize a classic pillar of crime namely crime material pillar with regard to those behaviors to which we address. Such behaviors involve many different and varied actions and leave of actions that latency of behavior, intangibility of harm at the beginning and diversity of harms along with a time span between behavior occurrence and harm expose are seen as important characteristics of these behaviors. Concerning the committers of such behaviors, it should be noted that in terms of the nature of such individuals’ personality, these behaviors are capable to be exposed by legal persons – either public or private laws – for different reasons and by similar or different goals while, in contrary, among the victims, there should be both natural and legal persons as losers of such behaviors.

Continuous droughts have facing villagers and farmers with various vulnerabilities and challenges. In this regard, villagers choose special local and specific strategies in confrontation of this creeping disaster in order to improve their adaptive capacity about drought. With respect to the importance of identification of common strategies of adaptation to reduce the vulnerability of the villagers about this natural phenomenon, the main purpose of this study is to explain the adaptation strategies of villagers to cope with the vulnerability of the drought in Pshtang Village from Ravansar township, that has been done by combination of qualitative research methods (PRA and Grounded Theory). The key informants of the village were selected to refer for purposeful sampling. Using participatory techniques including transact walking, land use mapping, tree problem, matrix ranking, focus groups and semi-structured conversation, data was collected. Open coding, axial and selective coding was utilized as the basis of data analysis. The findings revealed that the most current adaptive capacity of rural households to drought can be categorized into five conceptual categories include social, economic, institutional, technical support and communication strategies.