bamboo

Jogyakarta Consultative Forum

One of projects that this household has been consumed by working on lately is the Humanitarian Bamboo project. The project came out of a recognition that bamboo is an under-utilised material in disaster response, partly due to the lack of access to simple technical information and poor understanding of the material within the humanitarian sphere. Bamboo is a local construction material in many parts of the world, but is still largely seen as unfamiliar, especially when compared to more commonly used materials such as timber, concrete or corrugated iron.

The project was also driven by the very successful use of bamboo in the Jogyakarta earthquake response, in which bamboo was used on a mass scale that was unique in the humanitarian sector. In the post-earthquake reconstruction efforts, 75,000 bamboo t-shelters were built by humanitarian sector in 9 months, and 2-3 times that number built by communities. One of the key reasons why these programs were so successful was because of local knowledge and cultural familiarity with bamboo as a traditional building material.

“The Humanitarian Bamboo Project aims to provide tools and resources to humanitarian workers to promote and facilitate the better use of bamboo in humanitarian response. Globally, there is a lot of knowledge about bamboo, both traditional knowledge and scientific knowledge: our priority is to synthesise that knowledge, simplify it, and make it accessible through appropriate literature and training”

Over the past two weeks, we’ve been focusing on organising the upcoming consultative workshop on humanitarian bamboo (26 June). The idea is to engage with the community of bamboo experts and humanitarian workers to produce something on using bamboo that is a collaborative effort. This is the second workshop that has been held for this project; another consultative workshop was held earlier this year in Pune, India, attended by Indian bamboo specialists as well as the NGO community. Although Dave’s been hired to develop a technical manual on bamboo, which he could do as an individual, there’s a lot of sense in developing something that engages and encompasses the wider community of users and experts, considering the importance of socialisation, acceptance and actual use of the material as opposed to the simple production of information. Clearly I agree, considering that I’m coming from the same place with my research!

There is a great deal of literature on the use of bamboo, but little that is tailored to the unique needs of humanitarian workers. So this workshop has been designed to be a crossover between humanitarian actors and bamboo specialists, a space for debate, discussion and argument to nut out essential principles of using bamboo in this context. The aim is to develop some guidelines that are technically satisfactory but not overengineered, guidelines designed for the humanitarian sector that take humanitarian needs and principles into account.

We had about 35 participants coming to the workshop, including people from CHF, IOM, IFRC, RedR India, Caritas Swiss, academics from UGM (University of Gadjah Mada) in Jogya, various local NGOs including DeJaRup and the LNGO network Kepala, and bamboo specialists and researchers from organisations like the Environmental Bamboo Foundation. The schedule was relatively open: presentations on the Humanitarian Bamboo project, the Jogya shelter response and bamboo research in the morning, discussions and break-out sessions followed in the afternoon, and we ended with a visit to several villages south of Jogyakarta which still had post-earthquake transitional bamboo shelters in use. On the second day, we visited Sahabat Bambu’s treatment warehouse, and MAP’s bamboo house.

The interplay of discussions between the NGO camp, the engineering/technicians and the bamboo specialists was fascinating. For example, there was much discussion on appropriate jointing techniques. One train of thought said that reinforced concrete bolted joints were optimal; the humanitarians pointed out that none of the temporary shelters (with comparatively low-tech jointing solutions) actually fell down in two years. From the humanitarian perspective, perfect technical solutions are inappropriate if they are expensive and time-consuming. There is no point making perfect houses at the expense of housing people quickly and adequately.

It is a fallacy that you can clear-cut bamboo with little effect on bamboo regeneration: even a renewable resource can be harvested in an unsustainable way (Notes from Jogya Forum)

Another interesting debate revolved around the tension between addressing humanitarian objectives vs environmental considerations. While these issues clearly do not have to be mutually exclusive, time constraints, limited resources and urgency of saving human lives often means that environmental considerations are thrown out the window. You want to consider the environment implications of an emergency housing program? Go find an environmental NGO. We’re busy housing people. And so on … Many of the bamboo specialists contended that the Jogyakarta shelter response deforested vast areas of bamboo in Central Java due to clear-felling and poor harvesting techniques; they said that when word got out that the shelter cluster en masse had taken up bamboo as a building material, a collective sigh spread through the bamboo community. One the other hand, the humanitarians argued that there is no hard evidence establishing the impact of the emergency reconstruction on Java’s bamboo stock, while recognising that it would not have been difficult to set up sustainable procurement systems. I’m continuing to explore this debate in subsequent blog posts with a chat to community bamboo trainer Ben Brown. Comments, anyone?

A key point was that time pressures and urgency of a humanitarian disaster (with a natural trigger) drastically modifies the criteria for appropriate and adequate solutions. What is necessary is to establish “best practice” guidelines within that context that are realistic and useable in a humanitarian context.

Some of the key recommendations that came out of the Forum include:

• A study needs to be carried out to definitively establish the impact of the Jogyakarta shelter response on Java’s bamboo forests.
• Clear guidelines for best clump management need to be drawn up and be easily accessible within the humanitarian sector. Bamboo management programs should be an integral part of future emergency shelter response from the start.
• A map of the bamboo resources in Indonesia (and potentially global bamboo availability) should be developed for humanitarian shelter purposes, e.g. a GIS map of bamboo resources within shipping distance. A simple map of bamboo distribution that could satisfy the three structural needs of humanitarian construction, on a regional scale with rough capacity of the bamboo stock would be sufficient for humanitarian actors to know whether a bamboo project is viable there.
• Although it might be outside the scope of disaster management agencies, it is worth considering planting bamboo to prepare for its use in humanitarian crises, or to consider the possibility of developing replanting programs or community carbon credit schemes.

In terms of my personal research, it was an extraordinary experience. Having experts from Indonesia and beyond spend two days discussing the subject that I’m researching was incredible. And like most conferences, the most interesting conversations occur informally: on the bus, over dinner, over drinks. The first aim of my research is simply to establish an understanding of the complexities of disaster response; referring to this, I had free-ranging conversations with a number of people about their many experiences working in disaster response. People were very generous with their time and opinions, and it was incredibly insightful for me to start developing a more detailed picture of disaster response. Interestingly, prior to coming here, some of the members of the Human Ecology Forum had suggested that my plan of only talking to disaster workers would result in a distorted perspective, as only communities could know the truth about what really happened to them as beneficiaries. However that assumes that only communities can be critical, and that all disaster workers believe the rosy reports that they are paid to write for their donors. Frankly, I’m less interested in talking to people who only can tell me that there is a problem than in talking to people who can tell me why the problem exists and who understand the complexities of the environment that the problem exists in. The people I talked to during this workshop were highly analytical, opinionated, comfortable with critiquing their experiences, and often had a broad understanding of the international disaster response enterprise drawn from years of many different experiences.

I had some wonderful conversations with Sarbjit Singh, the director of the disaster training organisation RedR India, about his numerous experiences working in disasters over many years. There were some interesting discussions with Loren Lockwood, an Australian working in Aceh for 3 and a half years with Caritas Swiss, about the NGO circus that descended on Aceh and issues around international aid, money, power, donors and funding. Ena Kuang, a WatSan specialist from IFRC, was particularly helpful with a big-picture view of international disaster response. Many people I’ve talked to end up discussing a number of issues in some depth; I’m currently working on a systems diagram mapping all of the issues surrounding disaster response that have come up in these conversations. Chatting with Ena, I was delighted to find that a single conversation, she covered nearly all these issues, which reassured me that I was on the right track with my feeling that the perception of disaster response across the numerous disaster workers who I’ve talked is quite coherent.

The most useful thing about the workshop was the opportunity to discuss my ideas with a range of professionals. In a similar vein to the approach taken by the Humanitarian Bamboo project, the idea driving my research process is that the most useful thing that I could do with my year of research into disaster response is to ask disaster response workers what they think are the key issues that need investigating, and make sure that I am on a continual process of incorporating those perspectives into my work.

Because of the questions raised in this workshop, I have decided to focus my research on exploring the use of bamboo in the Jogyakarta earthquake response, as a way of considering processes involved in enabling low-environmental impact, sustainable practice in disaster response. I’d be interested in hearing about people’s opinions or experiences of the Jogya shelter reconstruction, or of other investigations into environmental implications of disaster response, internationally. Please leave a comment.

The detailed notes that I took for the Forum are available here, from the Humanitarian Bamboo - Jogya Forum website.

© Kim Williamson 2008