About

About me

I studied at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, a bachelor in Asian Studies (Thai) and bachelor in Arts (Honours). I majored in Human Ecology (in the Fenner School of Environment and Society in the College of Science), Development Studies, Asian Studies (Southeast Asia) and Thai+ languages. My family is Australian and Thai, and I spent two and a half years of my studies living and studying across metropolitan and rural Thailand. I spent my honours year researching resilience and sustainability in disaster response and the humanitarian sector, including three months of fieldwork in Indonesian. I now work as a researcher for the Global Poverty Project.

My research interests lie in interdisciplinary work at the junction of the natural environment and society. I am a generalist rather than a specialist, and see integrative work as having the most potential to effect the transformative changes needed to address the interconnected environmental and humanitarian crises facing the world today. My criteria for my own research is that it should be practical and relevant in some way; I believe that as researchers we have an ethical responsibility to work towards improving or benefiting the situations and communities that we are privileged to learn from. I am continually impressed by the amazing people I meet, and at the wealth of knowledge between them; I see the value of my work being in collecting, integrating and reflecting their experiences and insights, and believe that collaborative work is the best way to achieve these goals.

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About this research

This website contributed to research for a Human Ecology thesis at the Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University in 2008.

The research has two aims:

• To develop a systemic understanding of complex social-ecological environment of disaster response from the perspective of the international humanitarian sector
• To explore resilience thinking as a conceptual framework for analysing disaster response.

The blog was developed during several months of fieldwork in Indonesia, talking to disaster management workers, NGO workers, academics and bamboo organisations, among others.

Background

I became interested in researching disaster management after hearing a keynote speech by Craig Williams, an information management officer from OCHA at a conference in Bangkok in 2006. The speech was on information management in disasters: the live-saving role that information plays in a disaster, the challenges of developing a platform for integrating historical data and new data generated by hundreds of agencies and thousands of people in the different GIS capacity and national context of each disaster, and an introduction to the cluster approach, with reference to the Pakistan earthquake in late 2005 and the Jogayakarta earthquake in early 2006.

Information can improve the quality and timeliness of relief assistance… information can promote cooperation and coordination, enable shared information gathering, allow data exchange among agencies, provide accountability through indicators, allow data analysis to influence policy, systematise monitoring, attract donor support, strengthen cluster leadership and create institutional knowledge.

Although the context of this speech was the role of the spatial sciences and GIS within disaster management, it struck a chord with my background in Human Ecology and its study of complex socio-ecological systems. Against the backdrop of the 2006 military coup, with tanks blocking the building and stalling the conference, I began thinking about disaster management in terms of systems theory, material stocks and flows analysis, and the information flows governing these material flows; for example, between international and local actors, and between local actors and the natural environment. The complex social and political environment that this occurs in adds another layer: the information and material flows of disaster response occur within a highly political environment, against a unique socio-cultural environment, with a pantheon of actors including international, national, local, government, NGO, community, with differing desires and mandates ranging from humanitarian, environmental, religious, rural, gender etc. Added to that the tension between globalised and local knowledge systems, or the processes of adapting international technical knowledge to culturally appropriate products, the aid process and international funding mechanisms, economic drivers, and a different set of ecological imperatives for each situation, and all of that playing out over a rapidly changing timeframe and in a chaotic environment where the needs of the disaster response will vary greatly from the very start of the emergency to several years on.

I was hooked.

With an eye to my upcoming year of Honours research, I started visiting my friend Dave Hodgkin in Jogyakarta, Indonesia. Dave has been based in Indonesia for the past five years, and has worked in emergency shelter and Cluster coordination in a number of large-scale disasters in Asia, as well as working as an international consultant in emergency and sustainable housing. I’d never been to Java, and thought it would be a fascinating introduction to disaster response…

Earthquake response in Jogyakarta

I first spent several days in Jogya in late 2006, several months after the Richter 6 earthquake earlier that year. It was my first experience of the devastation of a post-disaster environment. Roofs of factories slumped on the ground like giant worms in the rice paddies; there was bricks and rubble everywhere, houses had fallen down, walls had crumbled, and the transformed landscape was interspersed with bright blue tarpaulins and tents and temporary shelters.

With over 300,000 houses destroyed and another 240,000 damaged, the earthquake was largely a shelter disaster. Dave had lived for several years in Tembi, a village south of Jogyakarta near the epicentre of the earthquake, in which about 90% of houses destroyed or heavily damaged. He was in the unique position of being a disaster management expert who was onsite from the start of the disaster. During the earthquake response, Dave worked for the Shelter Cluster as coordinator and technical advisor, and was barely off his phone during the whole time that I was there.

A year later, I returned to Jogya for a month. Post-disaster reconstruction was continuing and people were still extremely busy. I was scoping for a research project, and talked with disaster workers and humanitarian aid workers (mostly international), academics and locals, all involved in diverse roles and capacities in the post-earthquake landscape. We had many conversations ranging broadly around disaster management, the Cluster system and shelter response in Jogya. People were very generous with putting up with my very basic questions and were quite forthcoming about their experiences. Some of the issues that repeatedly came up included the donor system, community resilience, the politics between aid agencies, government and local actors, accountability to beneficiaries or lack thereof, the role of communities in practice, not as reflected in NGO reports, the stages of disaster relief, and issues involved in navigating a cross-cultural landscape. I was increasingly appreciative of my opportunity to have a year of reflection and research on a single topic, especially in this field of emergency response, in which opportunities for field workers to research and reflect on their experiences are limited.

After many years at ANU playing in libraries with much more esoteric research topics, it was exciting to explore an area that wasn’t just something that I alone found interesting, but that was connected to current issues that people in the field were grappling with. In people’s houses, over meals in warung restaurants around Jogya, on the backs of motorbikes getting rides around town, I asked disaster workers, academics, researchers and other people I was chatting with, What do you see as the key issues in disaster response? What are the greatest challenges for you in this line of work? What research would you be interested in reading about? If you having the opportunity to do a year of research, what would you do?

The first thing that struck me was that everyone said something different. After asking people about what they thought were important issues in disaster management, some talked about disaster risk reduction; others about coordination within the disaster response; some about the relationship between local communities and international agencies, some about local government, some about the donor and funding mechanism, and yet others about spectific programs. Coming from a systemic methodological approach, I found this fascinating, as well difficult to pick out a single topic to focus on.

I realised that it was essential to start any research problem in a general understanding of disasters: an appreciation of the chaotic and complex operating environment of a disaster response, the uncertainties and complexities, the actors involved in disaster response, how they are related, mapping out of issues around disaster response, and how a disaster response unfolds over time. Although this has seemed self-evident and perhaps unnecessary to some disaster workers who I’ve talked to, in hindsight it seems obvious that it is necessary to situate any study of a complex problem in an integrative, systemic understanding of the situation, in order to meaningfully explore that problem.

At the same conference in 2006 that had sparked my interest in disaster response, I had another encounter that strengthened my interest in systems approaches and integrative environmental research. Fraser Taylor from ISC Global Mapping and Carleton University in Canada was kind enough to spend a lunch chatting to me about interdisciplinary research, the nature of holistic, integrative research, and researching issues around sustainability and complex environmental problems. It was heartening to talk to someone with strong foundations in ecletic interdisciplinary research interests (geography, environmental science, the application of geomatics to socio-economic issues, cartography and cybercartography, and rural development), with a research team from nine disciplines working in as diverse fields as computer games, education, music and interactive indigenous people’s maps.

Although I feel like I’m finishing a fairly coherent university degree that sits somewhere in the junction of Asian studies, social sciences, environmental sciences and development studies, the reality of studying an inter-Faculty, interdisciplinary degree is that it doesn’t actually exist as a formalised path in the university. There’s no sense of communual affirmation like being part of a law faculty, or engineering students’ society. In fact, although the trend is swinging towards knowledge synthesis and integration, in a society that traditionally rewards specialists people are more likely to question the value of a generalist degree. So what exactly do you study? What can you do with that? What kind of job can you get? It was wonderful to hear some words of support from an established academic doing interesting, world-changing work; to get a sense of how interdisciplinary research can actually work.

Fieldwork 2008: a case study in the use of bamboo in emergency shelter

After formally commencing my Honours year at ANU in Canberra in early 2008, I’ve now returned to Indonesia for three months to carry out fieldwork. I’m based in Jogyakarta, Java, and have also been spending time in Bali and Jakarta. I’ve been following around my primary informant, Dave Hodgkin, and also interviewing a number of disasters workers and researchers.

There are two main aims of my fieldwork, the first being to develop a broad overview of disaster response through talking to people who have worked in or with international disaster response. This has mostly involved talking to international disaster workers about their experiences in various countries. I have talked to people who have worked for (or are currently employed by) Oxfam, Caritas, CRS, AusAid, IFRC, IOM, NRC, various UN agencies, and several LNGOs. We’ve had broad-ranging conversations about their experiences in Jogyakarta, Aceh, Nias island, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kenya, Burundi, Sri Lanka, the Phillipines and other countries. I’ve also had a chance to chat to some Western and Indonesian academics studying disaster response.

People have questioned my choice of not talking to disaster-affected communities; this was partly a practical decision based on the fact that I don’t speak Indonesian as well as the difficulty of developing a relationship with a community in a short timeframe; partly due to wanting a broad overview rather than focusing on community-level experiences, and partly due to the desire to talk to people who have a broader understanding of disaster response as an international enterprise, instead of people who might be able to discuss problems that they experience, but not explain why. I’ve elaborated on this here and here.

To this end, I’ve drafted a conceptual diagram of all the issues discussed by all my informants. Being a visual person, I’m finding this a useful way to represent the interconnected relationships of actors and issues, and to structure my understanding of the complex operating environment of disaster response. Obviously this is just a visual tool, and not a model of “reality”.

The second aim of the fieldwork is to explore a case study of the use of bamboo in transitional shelter in the Jogyakarta earthquake response. After the earthquake in May 2006, the Cluster approach was used to facilitate an usually coherent response across the international NGOs, local NGOs, government and communities, which focused on facilitating the widespread production of community-built transitional bamboo structures, to fill the gap between emergency shelter (tents and tarpaulins) and government-assisted permanent shelter. It is an interesting case study because it highlights some of the conflicts between environmentalism and humanitarianism in the high-pressure context of disaster response. Bamboo was chosen as a culturally appropriate, environmentally low-impact “green” option, which drew on community knowledge and local construction technologies. The design was successful in that it was widely appropriated by disaster-affected communities outside of formal programs run by the international aid response. However there were a series of unforseen environmental implications of this widespread use of bamboo, as it is possible to harvest a renewable resource in a non-renewable way. Some of reasons for this include the difficulties of accessing accurate information about bamboo stocks, which are essentially a community resource, the difficulties of forecasting the environmental implications of using bamboo, and the absence of widespread technical knowledge within the humanitarian sector about bamboo. Furthermore, even the process of deciding on a culturally appropriate “green” material, adopting it across the Cluster and then promoting it across the community disaster response is a complex social process. So what I’m looking at systemically are the concurrent processes and conditions necessary to implement sustainable, locally appropriate reconstruction within the complex environment of disaster response. Considering that shelter has one of the highest demands on resources in disaster response, looking at these issues through a case study is an interesting way to explore opportunities for improvements in sustainable practice in disaster response.

After spending 4-5 months reading literature on disaster management back in Canberra, I’m aiming to spend the second half of my research directly engaging with people on these issues. Instead of becoming a reader specialist in a library, I want to spend my time getting a feel for where these issues sit in the diverse communities of actors associated with disaster response. Alongside being based in Indonesia in a disparate community of disaster workers, talking to people at every opportunity, this also involves writing up these opinions (mine included) and putting them on online, in order to create a space for eliciting commentary and discussion. This website is thus the platform for this iterative, collaborative research process, as well as my tool in the writing process, and a tribute to the people who have shared their experiences, knowledge and opinions with me.

Thanks to Dan Mackinlay for inspiring this website through his original wiki and online thesis.
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“I believe that together we can really make a difference. One man cannot make a difference, but if we can partner, if we can have the collective will and the willingness to make a difference in our nation, we can really do make a difference.”
- Vusi Wiseman Kweyama, South Africa

The kids from the Oaktree Foundation and the Make Poverty History campaign for me embody the potential of collaboration and new pathways for transformation on a global scale. The Oaktree Foundation collaborated with the Melbourne hip hop group Bliss N Eso and the Connections Zulu Choir to produce this video.

© Kim Williamson 2008