disaster management

Resilience and change in disaster response

After our discussions on transformational change and its application in sustainability research at the Human Ecology Forum last Friday, I’ve been thinking about sustainability, resilience and change in disaster response.

My understanding of sustainability in disaster response is twofold. Firstly, a sustainable disaster response necessitates a consideration of the environmental and human aspects of the recovery efforts themselves - for example in the Jogya earthquake response, the choice of bamboo had both a low environmental impact, as well as being a locally appropriate material that used existing local knowledge, technology and skills about construction and maintenance. The second aspect is strengthening community resilience to disasters, considering that disaster recovery can only have a long-term effect only if a community’s capacity to cope with disasters has improved or their initial vulnerability to disasters reduced. This is summed up by the industry catch-cry of “Build Back Better”.

I’ve seen the motto “Build Back Better” used across the humanitarian sector - from the FAO to UNICEF to the shelter sector, where people are literally building back better. But I’ve been wondering what it actually means in terms of resilience and change to communities: build back better = build back different? Who’s idea of better?

Here’s an excerpt from an article on “Building Back Better: Creating a Sustainable Community After Disaster” from the Natural Hazards Informer at the University of Colorado (my emphasis in bold).

“Applying the principles of sustainability when making decisions can help communities avoid the pitfalls of adopting a course of action without realizing it will have detrimental impacts at another place or time. Ideally, all communities would routinely adopt a long-term view and incorporate sustainability ideals into all aspects of their comprehensive planning process—whether making development decisions, preparing for a disaster, implementing mitigation, or undertaking any other program.

In the absence of this ideal situation, however, a person concerned with avoiding losses due to hazards and disasters must look for opportunities to integrate sustainability with mitigation measures wherever possible. One fertile field for this integration is the disaster recovery period.

A disaster brings temporary changes to a community. People think about problems they normally do not consider—the risks they face from hazards, the quality of local housing, ways in which the community could be better planned and constructed, the local scenic and other natural resources, livability. At the same time, public officials have the media attention that enables them to garner support for innovative ideas. A disaster forces a community to make a seemingly endless series of decisions—some large, some small, some easy, and some quite difficult. Technical and expert advice becomes available from public and private sources. Financial assistance flows into the community, enabling it to tackle more ambitious projects than would normally be the case.

These changes can be viewed as opportunities to rebuild in a better way, instead of succumbing to the natural desire to put things back the way they were as soon as possible. They can provide a chance for a community to implement forward-looking activities that for one reason or another (usually financial or political) have not been undertaken, including improvements in lifestyle, safety, economic opportunity, or the environment. After a disaster, a community must take action to recover, so incorporating principles of sustainability into that process often does not involve much additional effort.”

It seems that to many people, disasters are an opportunity to change things. On the one hand, there is a reasonable argument that some things must change: if the community is rebuilt exactly the same way as before, they have the same vulnerability to disaster as they did before. On the other hand, disasters also open up opportunities for people to take advantage of the chaos to wipe the slate clean, or simply implement their beliefs about how things should be run; whether that be governments wanting a quick solution to illegal slums and informal settlements, developers wanting to gain access to prime real estate, or idealistic INGOs wanting to implement their particular humanitarian solution, whether that be bizarrely inappropriate or a hip environmentally-focused eco-friendly project that is simply different to local norms. Naomi Klein’s recent book The Shock Doctrine goes into much detail about the pro-corporate policies that get implemented by governments and multinationals in the window of opportunity following the upheaval caused by disasters.

So we need to be clear about what kind of change we are talking about.

We need to be clear that the role of the humanitarian sector is to return communities to normality, to reinstate the same community practices and structures, but hopefully better adapted to future disasters. Its role is not to come in and determine that a community would be better off doing things some other way. This puts the community values and practices first: it gives the community the right to define normality. For example, in shelter reconstruction, the disaster-affected communities should be the ones defining what a “house” is. This is not to stifle community-driven change, but to note that post-disaster, humanitarian agencies need to be realistic about power imbalances and difficulties of a genuine community consultative process when they turn up to damaged and disoriented communities bringing funds, resources, technical knowledge and … solutions.

In systems speak, we are talking about strengthening the communities’ adaptive capacity and creating a more resilient system, not moving to an entirely new system. Community resilience might manifest in the physical environment, e.g. building safer housing, but is fundamentally about people - developing the skills to build and maintain safer housing, and strengthening the social structures that support a functional community.

Here are some excerpts from an earlier interview with Dave Hodgkin on post-disaster shelter reconstruction and international humanitarian response.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

“Lets’s start talking to people about what quality construction is, and how to build properly, and then started working with communities to look at affordable systems for communities that fit in with their image of what a building is and what it should be and what they want and desire and dream of. Systems that use available local materials, support local cultural practice and norms, and affirm and promote the communities own aesthetic values. Then imagine arriving at a shared solution. You want to get to the point where the community is building something that the community wants, and hopefully something that is built better than what the community built before and most importantly hopefully it’s something that the community will spontaneously reproduce because they understand it, they believe in it and it works for them.”

….

“We need to stop thinking of houses as finished static objects and instead realize that for all of us our homes are a ‘process’ that evolves with our ever changing needs and capacity to realize those needs…For me then the question becomes how can we ensure the work we do now influences that future development, so that when we do return 30-50 years hence, we find a community that is continuing to build in a risk-averse manner.”

…

Post-earthquake dome house in Jogyakarta

“In disasters our core mission is to supply timely and strategic inputs to assist families achieve a rapid return to normality. We are dealing with a traumatised population suffering great loss, and our job is to get them back to a normal life: to help them return to work, help them return to living in adequate shelter, etc. and in doing so, help them to return to a state that is more disaster resilient.”

…

“I think that in development there are different issues. In development, we’re trying to sit down and say, These people, for whatever reason, haven’t got something that we believe they need, and we need to help them develop to this next level or stage. Then you’re saying, We want to introduce new technology, we want to introduce computers, or improved health care systems, improved housing systems. Then there’s more of a place for the introduction of new technology.”

“In disasters, the less new technology we can introduce the better, the more normal the outcome the better. Minimalist intervention is the order of the day. So unless we have a disaster in a dome-based community I see little excuse for, what is in effect, using a traumatized population as guinea pigs for some broader social development experiment.”

…

“Logical solutions tend to be solutions that make sense to communities: appropriate technology is technology that gets appropriated.

…

“The thing that leaps to mind when I hear those words is that in a disaster our job isn’t to change the way people think. But lot of people come in thinking it is. It is our job to promote sustainable, durable and culturally appropriate solutions in harmony with the desires of the local population.”

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

So how to achieve community resilience, not systems change? I think a key part of it is widespread, simple, clear and accessible information and training in humanitarian principles for anyone taking part in a humanitarian response. Disaster responses are unique in inspiring otherwise ordinary people to sacrifice their time to work, volunteer, or contribute in some way towards a disaster; the other side of that is that professionalism in this field is an ongoing issue. It is unreasonable to expect newcomers to understand humanitarian principles; even the best intentions can be misguided through ignorance of basic principles and action. Anyone, anywhere in the world can start up a nonprofit organisation, and turn up at the next disaster with bolts and timber or clothes or domes or whatever they believe is necessary, with no knowledge of the local context and no regulation of their actions.

So if we are talking about transformative change in disaster response, we are not talking about creating new community systems. We’re really talking about fundamentally changing the way that disaster responses are carried out. For me, we’re talking about two main issues. The first is recognising the primacy of the local community desires and values, and responding accordingly. So resilience is about strengthening the existing system, not making an entirely new system that is also resilient to disasters. In terms of the humanitarian response, this means clarity about the role of the international or humanitarian sector and humanitarian principles (which is not currently the case). It also includes the ability to be responsive to the changing needs of the community over time, not just in the initial weeks when the early assessments are carried out. However, this does not tend to fit very well with the often rigid system of donors and funding (although some are flexible), and there’s a whole host of reasons for this such as corruption and accountability, what the donor is getting out of it etc.

The second issue is achieving a truly integral approach to disaster response. My research looks at integrating environmental and humanitarian imperatives, but more generally, the most effective disaster responses seem to aim or to be able to integrate a plurality of perspectives, in practice, not just in policy. I like the phrase from Funtowitz and Ravetz describing post-normal science: “a systemic, synthetic, and humanistic approach”. But this seems particularly difficult to achieve in practice…

So my questions to readers are:

From a systems thinking perspective, does this brief analysis of resilience and the locus of change in disaster response work?

For disaster workers, does my presentation of disaster response reflect your reality? Does this analysis of resilience and change work for you? Do you find the concepts a useful way of understanding disasters?

© Kim Williamson 2008