A disaster is defined as a “humanitarian catastrophe associated with a natural hazard event” (Pelling and Dill 2009: 22). Governments, corporations, investors take advantage of the desperation and destruction in the aftermath of these natural hazard events to expedite sweeping neoliberal policies such as privatization, deregulation, marketization which reshape societies in the interest of a few elite (Venugopal 2015: 4; Gotham 2012: 633; Pelling and Dill 2009: 22-24).

In the recent past, disaster events have become commonplace. Their severity and impact has been tremendous (Sandoval and Gonzalez-Muzzio 2015: 1). The rise in their number and gravity has been paralleled by an almost simultaneous rise in neoliberal reforms (Sandoval and Gonzalez-Muzzio 2015: 1). Neoliberal reforms “are political reforms conducted by governments aimed to establish an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade” (Harvey 2005: 2). Harvey (2005: 4) asserts that these reforms are rooted in neoliberalism as “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills.” Neoliberalism rose to prominence in the 1970s and 80s as a policy reaction to economic downturns that plagued U.S. and European states (Prasad 2006). Saad-Filho and Johnston (2005: 2) term neoliberalism as “a hegemonic system of enhanced exploitation of the majority, a global system of minority power, plunder of nations and despoilment of the environment which tramples upon the poor, undermines rights and entitlements, and defeats resistance through a combination of domestic political, economic, legal, ideological and media pressures, backed up by international blackmail and military force if necessary.” Gotham (2008: 1042) describes it as a “political ideology that advocates market-based solutions to social problems and has influenced a range of policies to engineer economic growth, privatize public services and assets, and intensify inter-urban competition for capital investment.” Thorsen and Amund (2006) contend that neoliberalism is “a loosely demarcated set of political beliefs which include the conviction that the only legitimate purpose of the state is to safeguard individual,