disaster management

Sustainable international disaster response

As the aim of my thesis is to explore sustainable practice in international disaster response, I’ve recently been asking a number of my informants to share their opinions about what a sustainable disaster response.

This blog post is still under development.

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Dr Patrick Kilby, Coordinator, Master of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development (MAAPD) Program, Australian National University.

In a sense a ‘sustainable disaster response’ is a contradiction in terms as disasters themselves lead to non-sustainable outcomes. Let me explain: the purpose of any disaster response should be to restore communities to where they were before, which to varying degrees is sustainable at least in the short terms. Long term climate changes and resource use may mean they are not sustainable, but that is another matter.

Any disaster response involves the transfer of resources. If those resources are local resources then the cost to the community can be very high either in the level of debt they might build up or in just reducing the resource base for future livelihoods. For example in East Timor following the referendum in 1999 the roofs of virtually all of the houses were stripped off and take across the border and sold. An international NGO had the idea of using local timber and other local natural resources but quickly found that they would reduce the resource base of those communities for decades if they did, so they shipped in iron roofing from Australia.

The question probably should be: what is an appropriate disaster response, which uses local skills and resources, but not to the extent that the cost in terms of the resource base of that community is reduced? Note: any form of recovery is costly and traumatic to local communities. This then requires a careful balancing act which capture local capacity and those local resources which can recover in terms of capacity or volumes quite quickly. It is also worth noting that using local resources can also stimulate local economies when they most need stimulating which is just after a disaster.

Therefore the key to a ‘sustainable disaster response’ is having clear picture of local resources and capacity and have them engaged in a way that there is a good balance between local resources which can be sustained rather than over exploited and external resources to either pay for the local resources or to complement them where sufficient local resources cannot be found without causing economic ecological or political problems into the future.

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Graeme MacRae, Social Anthropology Programme, School of Social and Cultural Studies, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand.

Graeme is an anthropologist with fifteen years research experience in Indonesia and familiarity with Jogjakarta going back to 1977, but no previous experience of the international aid industry until he spent six weeks in Jogjakarta shortly after the earthquake, studying the international response. His impressions were of a system alarmingly disconnected from the local realities it was supposed to be addressing. In Graeme’s opinion, a sustainable disaster response should be based on (genuinely) local resources, and be designed and managed at a local community level. In the following excerpt from a recent article published in Development in Practice, Volume 18, Issue 2, 2008, Graeme describes the rebuilding of a earthquake-affected village called Ngibikan in south Jogyakarta, which he sees as an exemplary case of a sustainable disaster response. A longer version of the article was blogged earlier here.

Large-scale international humanitarian disaster response is easy to criticise, but is there any alternative? In Jogjakarta the answer is yes. There was at least one alternative: faster, cheaper, technologically innovative, culturally appropriate, aesthetically pleasing – and also small-scale, initiated, controlled and implemented at the level of the local community.

Ngibikan is a village of 65 houses right in the heart of the effected area. After the earthquake only one house was left standing. Three months later, all were rebuilt and occupied. The new houses were more earthquake-resistant than the old ones, better ventilated and arguably more beautiful. At this stage the IHRS was still distributing tarpaulins, collecting data and planning for the mass construction of very minimal temporary shelters. How did they do it?

Immediately after the earthquake a national newspaper launched an appeal to raise funds, then looked for ways to spend them. They contacted Eko Prawoto, a local architect with a reputation for beautiful, innovative, cost effective designs based on traditional local styles, materials and technologies. One of his building teams came from Ngibikan, so he contacted them and within days they had worked out a standard design, built a prototype of the main structure and cleared most of their sites of wreckage. The community decided to build all the houses together, organising their collective labour by a traditional system known as gotong-royong. They divided themselves into teams led by their most experienced builders, each specialising in one stage of the process, and they worked from house to house. Eko and Pak Maryono, the headman of Ngibikan, used their contacts to get good deals on good materials. Less than two weeks after the earthquake, they started rebuilding.

When I first saw them a month later the frames were nearly all prefabricated, and most of them had been erected and the first roofs were going on. Once the roofs were on, the walls were filled in with bricks and joinery salvaged from the old houses supplemented by new materials. By the end of August, they were all complete, sufficient for their owners to complete them individually and move in when they were ready. At this stage few other villages had any but the most rudimentary temporary shelters. Does this mean Ngibikan did well, or did the IHRS do badly?

Certainly Ngibikan began with some advantages: adequate (but not extravagant) funding up front, with no bureaucratic strings attached or complicated procedures to access it and some good building skills within the community. But there was money in the IHRS too and many communities had building skills. According to Eko and Maryono the most important factors were the ordinary resources already existing in the village: collective, democratic decision-making, the egalitarian distribution of resources and sharing of labour as well as the absence of unrealistic expectations in terms of style and size of houses. Together these seem to have led to a sense of common ownership of and commitment to the project. The fact that the whole project took place at the “natural” scale of the existing community, in which everyone knew each other undoubtedly facilitated the factors mentioned above. What Eko and Maryono did not mention were their own roles in the process, as key people with complementary roles, one inside the community, the other outside, but both known and trusted by each other and the community, and working closely together. They are also both men of exceptional ability and commitment. Taken together, these factors enabled them to lead the community to quickly and accurately assess the situation, make decisions based on real understanding and implement them efficiently without complicated procedures. So they did very well, but this was no excuse for the (partial) failure IHRS.

On one hand this story reads like a perfect illustration of all the ideological principles of the development industry: “community-based”, “participation”, mobilising “social capital”, etc. On the other hand, the list of factors which enabled the Ngibikan project reads like almost the opposite of what the IHRS system was doing in practice and what the development system often seems to do. So, is there perhaps a gap between between the ideology and practice of the international relief/development system? Is the centralised, globalised, bureaucratic, top-down structure of the system, the way it actually works, out of step with its ideologies of community scaled participation? If there is, maybe its time to think about changing it. There are unlikely to be magic bullets, but if there is anything to be learnt from this story is that small can be beautiful, local knowledge is critical and that working relationships between real people who know and trust each other are what makes things happen.

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© Kim Williamson 2008