The paper aims at tracing the mechanisms of the development of the disaster management model in South African institutions, to explain its emergence at a particular time and its development through a “reactive chain” following its initial introduction. By doing so, the objective is to connect a national pattern of state building through defence and democratisation (part 1) with a process of internationalisation of disaster management. This connection happened throughout a series of encounters between the local and the global, between experts and policy-makers (part 2). The paper will finally argue that disaster management “inbreeding” is the mechanism through which the circulation of disaster risk governance is realised (part 3).
