Introduction

Disability has long been a neglected topic within the field of international development studies. However, with the growth of a coordinated and influential disability movement, together with increased international recognition of disability as a human rights issue, the need to respond to disability is now emerging as a development priority that can no longer be ignored. The most obvious indication of this was the adoption in 2006 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), widely heralded as a landmark achievement for the disability movement and a ‘game-changer’ in terms of raising awareness of disability rights on the international stage. The CRPD has now been ratified by the vast majority of nation states, signifying a near-global consensus on the need to remove the discriminatory barriers that hinder the full participation of disabled people in society. Governments around the world have followed up on this commitment by introducing a plethora of legislative and policy measures designed to foster more disability-inclusive societies. More recently, the post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda, which boldly promises to ‘leave no one behind’, highlights the rising profile of disability through several explicit references, in stark contrast to the Millennium Framework’s silence on the matter. Yet further evidence of the increased prominence of disability within mainstream development circles can be found in the Sendai Framework (United Nations, 2015), ¹ adopted at the 2015 World Disasters Conference as a blueprint to guide disaster risk reduction and management processes until 2030. Crucially, this framework goes beyond recognising the vulnerability of disabled people when disasters occur to highlighting their potential to become active agents of disaster planning and recovery.