There will be no more updates for this blog, but I am continuing work in a similar vein through the Humanitarian Bamboo project.

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.

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.

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T-shelter, Jogyakarta shelter 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.”

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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.

Post-earthquake dome house in Jogyakarta

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?

Bantul, Jogyakarta, after the earthquake. Photo credit: Eko Prawoto.

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.

Family still living in bamboo housing, 2008. Photo credits: Dave Hodgkin.

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.

Ngibikan village, Jogyakarta, 2006. Photo credits: Eko Prawoto.

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.

Ngibikan village, Jogyakarta, 2006. Photo credits: Eko Prawoto.

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.

Building houses, Ngibikan village, Jogyakarta, 2006. Photo credits: Eko Prawoto.

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.

Ngibikan village, Jogyakarta, 2006. Photo credits: Eko Prawoto.

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.

Finished houses, Ngibikan village, August 2006. Photo credits: Eko Prawoto.

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

The role of the international humanitarian sector in disaster response is an important one and that is to support local initiatives. It is only in rare cases where local initiatives are overwhelmed or lack [usually political] capacity. This issue of local capacity is often overlooked and the international humanitarian organisations see themselves as both having the capacity and too some extent being ‘saviours’, which paradoxically weakens their effectiveness in the response.

Let’s take the example of the tsunami of 2004 and its impact on the South East Indian coastline. India was the third most devastated country after Indonesia and Sri Lanka. It did not ask for international help and would not accept any as it had a strong record and capacity itself. For the first week after the tsunami [and this was the case in other countries] local community do most of the work where they support each other provide food water etc. while waiting for the police and usually the army to bring in immediate relief. It is the strength of those local community structures which make the most difference rather than the international response. Too often though a view is taken that this level of local capacity does not exist.

Secondly, for the next phase which is the relief phase there is usually other local capacity in the form of local NGOs who may be doing education or development work in those communities, who can be tapped on to deliver the relief response. Now while they may not have the technical skills, they do know the local community and so can help gain the trust of the community and more easily identify the most in need.

So where does the international humanitarian agencies fit into this model? Their traditional role has been to literally fly in with their water systems, tents, food and the like, and in the process by-pass local NGOs, and local capacity. Another approach would be to tap into the local NGO and community capacity and support them. In India after the tsunami, the existing loose network of NGOs came together and within a matter of a couple of weeks were in a position to engage with the people who they have been working with for years and deliver necessary relief supplies. The role of the international humanitarian organisations was to mobilise resources and deliver them quickly ‘to the local NGO’ and also proved the necessary coordinating and accountability infrastructure. The model was one whereby the humanitarian organisations actually did not go in at village level. International humanitarian organisations are good at mobilising massive resource very quickly, but they are less good at local delivery simply because they do not have the local knowledge, or usually the local language, or know the local communities.
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Graeme MacRae, Social Anthropology Programme, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand.

In brief, Graeme believes that “the international humanitarian sector is always there - and it always does its best to help - but because of the way global (rather than local), industrial (rather than based in local resources), top-down (rather than bottom-up) approaches are built into it so deeply, it has certain inherent weaknesses that get repeated again and again. Also, its preoccupation (obsession?) with its own internal processes and co-ordination seems to me to be a poor substitute for the more challenging task of listening to the people/communities it is supposedly there to help”.

Here are some excerpts from a longer article by Graeme on the Jogyakarta earthquake response, blogged earlier here. The full article was published in Development in Practice, Volume 18, Issue 2, 2008, pages 190 - 200.

The international humanitarian response system (IHRS) consists of resources and expertise embodied in thousands of people in hundreds of organizations dispersed all over the world. They (collectively and to a large extent individually) see disasters as essentially similar sets of problems (shelter, health, water and sanitation, etc.) which can be analysed and addressed in essentially similar ways. In other words it is a global system based on a set of standard assumptions and universalised knowledge. All that needs to happen is for it to be mobilised, get to the scene fast, and move into action.

Building a transitional bamboo shelter, Jogyakarta 2006

In fact, when the system arrives at the scene of a disaster the reality it encounters is very local and very specific – in terms of geography, environment, history, politics, culture, social organization, religion and language – not to mention people. One of the most extraordinary things about the system, is that this is not even seen as relevant, let alone a problem. Advertising for field staff for IHRS organizations rarely even mentions local experience, knowledge or language skills. Of the hundreds of international aid workers who arrived in Jogjakarta, very few had any of these. Consequently when the system arrives, with all its skill, experience and resources, the one thing it does not know is how to communicate with local people, communities, organisations or government, with the partial exception of those who happen to speak some English. But this is not seen as particularly important, because the real priorities seem to be setting up offices, data collection and analysis systems, logframes, maps and matrices – then meetings and systems of communication – between agencies – all in the city and all in English. If local organisations are involved, they usually have to fit into this system as best they can.

But what about the ruined villages just down the road – and the thousands of people huddled under their blue plastic tarpaulins? Many aid workers rarely if ever get to meet them. The interface between the system and the people it is supposed to serve is mediated by what are known as “partnerships” with local NGOs, who know the local scene and how to talk to people. This is in theory not a bad idea, adapted from current practice in the wider development industry. But even here it is not without its problems, because of the widely varying priorities, styles and capacities of local NGOs, and real cultural, social and often political gaps between them and on one hand the international organizations and on the other, local communities. Partnerships take time and hard work to build and maintain at the best of times. In the worst of times - the overheated, chaotic, time-scarce conditions of a disaster response, the chances of success, let alone instant success, are much less.

As a result, in Jogjakarta, weeks, even months after the earthquake, most IHRS staff knew little about the people they were there to help, and the people in the villages knew just as little about the IHRS. Some partnerships worked smoothly and efficiently – but many did not. This fundamental gap of different worlds, world-views and communication between them was a major obstacle to accurate understanding, and seriously delayed decision-making and hindered effective action. It also leads us directly to another weakness of the system - scale.

Bamboo t-shelter, Jogyakarta 2006

Concepts such as “participation” and “community-based development” are well established within the development industry, for the good reason that evidence tells us (like commonsense) that things work better when they happen at the level of real communities and people have a sense of knowledge and involvement in them. However, like “partnerships”, these do not happen automatically or quickly – they take time and local knowledge to build. The former is a scarce resource in post-disaster conditions and the latter is even scarcer in the IHRS. So, in practice, in Jogjakarta, resources for construction of both temporary and permanent shelter, were delivered mostly via impersonal, bureaucratic chains from donors to international NGOs, to local NGOs and/or local government to local leaders, to communities and eventually to households. Like the communication gaps, this too led to complication, high costs and ample opportunities for inefficiency, corruption and delays.

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.

Karen hilltribe community, Chiang Mai, northern Thailand

I recently heard that the Global Poverty Project is looking for research assistants. The blurb on the GPP says;

“The Global Poverty Project will catalyse the international movement to end extreme poverty by creating a 90 minute feature slideshow that clearly but deeply communicates the challenges and opportunities of extreme poverty, and what can be done about it. It will be simple yet sophisticated, accessible for every person and grounded in best practice and scientific knowledge. It will tell the story of poverty, as well as the personal stories of those living in poverty. It will speak to the cynic, inspiring them at the same time. It will be shocking, compelling and demand action, while upholding the dignity and respect of those we are seeking to assist.”

The thing which really excites me about this project is its potential global impact. Anyone who has had even a cursory glance through this website will know that the main desire driving my research is the goal to do something useful, practical or relevant. I want to use my research skills to engage in current global issues, not academic games. This year, working on an emerging issue in global emergency shelter has fit the bill. Next…?

The Global Poverty Project caught my attention because I’m currently assisting the Benchmark Consulting team with a comprehensive report that they’re producing for Oxfam International: “Combined Oxfam’s Indonesia Country Analysis: An Assessment of the Changing Nature of Poverty in Indonesia over the next ten years.” It’s a fascinating report, the fruit of research and extensive series of interviews with key figures in Indonesian civil society, government and academia, to determine the current dynamics and drivers of poverty alleviation, governance and the struggle for basic rights in Indonesia beyond the statistics and the often sluggish academic literature.

One of the criteria for the research position is current knowledge of poverty-related trends in at least two of the following disciplines: international politics, development studies, economics, history, geography, anthropology, law, public health, or related social science. So just for fun, I thought I’d do a special post on poverty-related trends in disaster management. Enjoy …
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KEY POINTS

• Over 200 million people were affected by disasters every year over the past two decades, and the impact of disasters continues to increase (ISDR 2005). Highly developed countries have an average of 22.5 deaths per disaster, compared to 1052 deaths per disaster for least developed countries (IFRC World Disasters Report 2001).
• Disasters affect the poor the most. They have a lower capacity to recover, they may be living in marginal or high-risk land, or in informal settlements, they may be politically marginalised and sidelined by government relief efforts. Disasters can have a much more long-term impact on the poor, with follow-on effects on health, families’ ability to send children to school, etc.
• Global efforts for disaster management are focused on disaster risk reduction (DRR) and preparedness. Globally, this has not been as successful as hoped with damage and destruction following disasters continuing to increase. Disaster response (carried out through the Cluster system) continues to be an important undertaking by the international humanitarian community.
• Key documents include the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005 - 2015: Building the Resilience of Nations and Communities to Disasters, key organisations include the inter-agency International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (established after the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction in the 1990s).

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Excerpt from the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005 - 2015: Building the Resilience of Nations and Communities to Disasters, 2005, p 1.

Disaster loss is on the rise with grave consequences for the survival, dignity and livelihood of individuals, particularly the poor, and hard-won development gains. Disaster risk is increasingly of global concern and its impact and actions in one region can have an impact on risks in another, and vice versa. This, compounded by increasing vulnerabilities related to changing demographic, technological and socio-economic conditions, unplanned urbanization, development within high-risk zones, under development, environmental degradation, climate variability, climate change, geological hazards, competition for scarce resources, and the impact of epidemics such as HIV/AIDS, points to a future where disasters could increasingly threaten the world’s economy, and its population and the sustainable development of developing countries.

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Excerpt from Handbook of Disaster & Emergency Policies & Institutions, John Handmer & Stephen Dovers, 2007: 3.

There are 90 million more human beings every year, and our societies and economies grow ever more complex and interdependent. The co-location of dense human settlements with potentially devastating natural and technological hazards suggests that we should expect more disasters, or at least more events that have the potential for disaster if not properly handled. The number of humans who exist in day-to-day survival mode, if not the proportion of the total population, appears to be increasing and is probably about half of all humanity - defined as those surviving on less than US$2 a day (UNDP, 2005) or who live in the 60 or so countries currently directly affected by warfare or violence. Such people have very limited capacity for disaster preparedness or recovery - their resources are inadequate for even their daily needs. This does not mean that people and their communities are not highly resourceful, but certainly their vulnerability to disruption is exacerbated.

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In the following interview, Dave Hodgkin discusses the relationship between poverty and disasters. Dave lives in Jogyakarta, Indonesia and works as an independent consultant in the humanitarian sector. He has worked in emergency shelter in a number of major disasters across Asia, and previously worked in community-based housing and the sustainable construction industry for over twenty years. He is a former student of the Human Ecology graduate program at the ANU.

Kim Williamson: So Dave, given the complex nature of disasters, how does poverty fit in to the picture?

Dave Hodgkin: Well, Kim, it’s an interesting topic … Disasters of course are only disasters because we are inadequately prepared for an event, not because of the actual event as such. If we all lived in earthquake resistant housing, then an earthquake ceases to be such a disaster… Preparedness for disasters then links directly to poverty: poor people are generally less prepared than rich people to deal with calamity. Firstly they tend to live in more marginalized locations, within flood zones, on steeply sloping lands, in dense urban settings etc. Secondly, due to lack of adequate finances for their (probably quite reasonable) housing aspirations, combined with a lack of structural knowledge or the capacity to hire someone with that knowledge, the poor often build more structurally inadequate buildings. This was so clearly the case in Jogjakarta earthquake, with the third highest recorded damage level per Richter scale in global history. People simply built badly, so at the first decent shake, it all fell down.

Finally, the poor - strangely enough - are often the hardest to assist! In Bangladesh in late 2007, millions of people living outside the protective cyclone embankments in the southern delta region of Barisal had their homes completely devastated by Cyclone Sidr. The government, quite responsibly, would not allow international agencies to assist these families to rebuild in such a clear danger zone. When then pushed to supply suitable land inside the embankments, although supportive, the government pointed out that if moved, millions and millions of similarly impoverished Bangladeshis would simply come and fill the ecological niche in these fringe areas.

People waiting for assistance in flooded areas after Cyclone Sidr, Bangladesh

Kim: It seems crazy that helping the poor can end up being more difficult than helping people who are more well-off …

Dave: Yes, it is strange and sad in many ways, but when you think about it, it makes sense. Helping anyone who has a higher capacity to help themselves is always easier than helping someone with a lower capacity. In fact this leads to some interesting dilemmas in disaster assistance. You can choose to help the low-hanging fruit: the easily targeted, highly receptive, well-organised villages where you know your program will be a great success, where you know the donor and the community will be happy. Or you can choose to help that fringe community, with really low education levels, very few members speaking the national language, high background poverty, more desperation, perhaps more dependancy on black markets and much less clear land ownership (such as the slum areas of Jakarta), where your program is going to take much much longer to implement and have remarkably less bang for your buck… An interesting dilemma.

Kim: Is it really that simple and if so what do people choose?

Dave: There is very little that is actually simple and clear in a disaster response. Certainly that reality exists, although I think that often we can only see in retrospect that we made such a choice: This community was easy to work with so we implemented more programs there - This one was difficult so we wound up what we were doing as best we could and moved on. Of course there is the trickle-down effect argument, classic rightwing politics. If we manage to get the easy half of a community back up and functioning quickly, they will return to employing and supplying services to the other half. I see this trend all the time in livelihoods sector, where large actors like Asian Development Bank and the World Bank will fundemantally implement this political viewpoint - and of course often achieve much more rapid success than agencies dealing with the more difficult end of the stick.

Kim: So how can we ensure we are targeting the right people?

Dave: Well, many of the big agencies like Oxfam, for example, have clear policies in place. They have a mission statement to always target “The poorest of the poor” etc. The reality is of course much more difficult than this. But at least they try, and through continous re-evaluation, they can determine if they are heading in the right direction. Though again, our temptation in evaluation is always to evaluate how well we did do, not how well we could have done… Though this too is important, as even in our industry workers need to have their positive efforts recognised and rewarded.

Kim: So Dave, how does all this fit in to sustainability and the bigger environmental picture?

Dave: Well Kim, as I am sure you can imagine, the poorest of the poor living in the most marginal circumstance face the greatest impact from climate change. The urban poor are pressed further and further to live in disaster-prone fringe areas. The rural poor face diminishing crops and natural resources, with limited skills to adapt. The story is obvious, the picture bleak!

Kim: So what are we or can we do about it…

Dave: There is a massive global shift at the moment towards disaster risk reduction, and community-based disaster preparedness has become a global aid industry catch cry, mainly funded through the cash that is floating around from Kyoto Protocol etc.

Kim: So is it working?

Dave: Nope.

Kim: Woah Dave, that’s pretty pessimistic!

Dave: Yep.

Kim: Can you clarify that?

Dave: Sure Kim. Global population levels are still rising (particularly amongst the poor). Global food supplies diminishing. Sea levels are rising. Climate change is devastating more and more crops. Rates of major catastrophes are going up. Fuel prices rising. All in all, it’s a very grim picture. These effects compound, situations become not twice as bad but four or ten times as bad. We have much larger impoverished populations living in ever more disaster prone circumstances with less and less capacity to deal with it. When we start talking about the scale of the ramping up of this… We simply do not have enough funds, and perhaps more importantly, we do not have enough skilled and capable workers to deal with this!

Kim: Not enough skilled workers?

Dave: Imagine the world before Aceh… A disaster of that size brought in unprecedented global aid, and every single global agency was stretched to bursting. There simple was not enough people around with the skills and knowledge to implement that scale of assistance in the timeframe required. And we wonder why 2-3 years later people were still living in tents…

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Excerpt from “Disasters, Development and Vulnerability” by Dr. John Twigg, Research Fellow in Disaster Studies, Benfield ULC Hazard Research Centre.

It is the social, cultural, economic and political environment that makes people vulnerable. This is most apparent in the economic pressures that force many of the poor to live in cheap but dangerous locations such as flood plains and unstable hillsides; but there are many less visible underlying factors - social and political as well as economic - that affect people’s ability to protect themselves against disasters or to recover from them.

Some groups are more vulnerable than others. Class, caste, ethnicity, gender, disability and age are all factors affecting people’s vulnerability. Those who are already at an economic or social disadvantage because of one or more of these characteristics tend to be more likely to suffer during disasters.

Vulnerability is not just poverty, but the poor tend to be the most vulnerable. In 1976 an earthquake killed 1,200 people and made 90,000 homeless in Guatemala City. Almost all of them lived in slum areas and many of their homes were in dangerous ravines and gorges - these were the only places they could afford to live in. The rich, in better constructed houses and safer locations, were affected far less.

More recently the Red Cross of Vietnam looked at flood victims in the Mekong Delta and found that the wealthier inhabitants were better able to withstand floods. They could afford to raise the foundations of their houses above the usual flood level, and because they did not depend on a daily wage for their economic survival their livelihoods were not so badly affected. The landless poor, on the other hand, had little room for manoeuvre: floods cut them off from food, fuel and income by stopping them from collecting wild vegetables, cutting firewood and working as day labourers.

When the cyclone strikes, the wealthy farmer has received a warning on his radio and leaves the area with his family and valuables in the truck. The storm surge (flood) partly destroys his house and the roof is taken off by the wind. Three cattle are drowned and his fields are flooded, destroying the crops. The youngest child of the poor family is drowned; their house is destroyed; both animals are drowned; their fields are flooded and the crops ruined.

The wealthy family use their savings to rebuild the house within a week. They replace the cattle and plough and replant their fields. The poor family does not have savings and has to borrow money for essential shelter from a local money lender, at exorbitant rates of interest. They manage to buy a calf but have to hire bullocks for ploughing their field, which they do too late since many others are in the same position and draught animals are in short supply. As a result, they go through a hungry period eight months after the cyclone.

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Our present era of globalization has changed the pathways through which natural hazard becomes humanitarian disaster …

- Natural Disaster and Development in a Globalizing World, Mark Pelling 2003, p xiv.
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Lung: Bangunjiwo village, Bantul, Jogyakarta

Please excuse me for wandering off the topic of disaster response, but on the subject of bamboo I can’t resist posting a few images and a text from Eko Prawoto’s current Leng / Lung (Inside / Outside) exhibition, exploring space, soul and Javanese tradition. I’ve been continually amazed this year seeing what can be done when people play with bamboo; it is an exceptionally strong and versatile material. It was gorgeous to see a number of artists play with it for this exhibition, concurrently held indoors at Cemeti Art House, and outdoors at Bangunjiwo village, Bantul, south of the Jogyakarta. Leng / Lung is a celebration of Eko’s 50^th birthday.

Eko Prawoto is an internationally recognised artist and environmental architect, who has created some fascinating installations exploring the local environment, place, and community as a visiting artist to a number of festivals around Australia, including Common Ground at Lakes Entrance and Shepparton, at which he built a huge temple/performance space out of fruit crates.

Our personal connection with Eko Prawoto is even more grounded than the Australian connection: he designed the house in Tembi at which I’m staying (here are some photos from a recent IDEA magazine photoshoot).

In addition to his artistic pursuits, Eko is a lecturer in architecture at Duta Wacana University, Jogyakarta. He also ran a successful post-earthquake shelter reconstruction project in a nearby village in 2006 (using a design of coconut wood-truss houses, similar in design to the Tembi house).

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Leng, Lung

A present dedicated to Eko Prawoto

If human is a caliph, then his presence is not only for vacation. There is obligation that every body has to do. Thus, birth will mean the beginning that should be marked and age can be read as the period of service.

Leng: Cemeti Art House

The most important thing from anniversary is not how joyous the party is but how we give meaning to this moment with reflection and self evaluation. Then, we will get the answer of “What we have done?’ and explain who we are at once.

Lung: Bangunjiwo village

A series of events have been prepared to celebrate Eko Prawoto’s 50th anniversary. There will be architecture book publication, documentary movie, sketches book launching, cultural oration, art performance, installation exhibition, and discussion. These events has been carefully prepared and organized by artists and workers as appreciation for Eko’s works which show his concern to the environment, harmony of nature, and social harmony. Parts of the anniversary program have been started at Cemeti Art House, Jogjakarta since August 7, 2008 and will last until September 7, 2008. Some events will also take place in a garden at Bangunjiwo Village, Kasihan, Bantul.

Eko himself does not want to be the ‘centre ‘of the whole celebration. Through his book entitled “2 (Eyes) + 50 (years) = 100 (Sketches)” and two bamboo installations named Leng and Lung; it seems that he wants to represent the form of ideas and attitude that have become the base of his creativity.

Spiritual experience, also personal and social ones, can be associated with Leng. The word, which means lubuk in Bahasa Indonesia or deep pool in English, is a natural room in him which keeps a number of paradoxes. He exists for something which is not there. To be of the not to be. He assumes limitation and hides boundless, or unpredictability.

Leng: Cemeti Art House

‘Something exists as the result of other thing which has gone’ probably is a certainty in life. From this depraved world, we can learn a lot about this mutual relationship. Leaves fall for its flowers. Then flowers fall for its fruits. Same thing happens in culture and human activities; each achievement requires the willingness of loosing of something. Always. The willingness of loosing something can also be interpreted as the requirement, compensation, effort, or even sacrifation.

Creativity - ‘establishing’ something which is ‘not yet exists’ can be related to Leng. The whole process did by the creator basically is establishing and accepting the lost at once. And so for his creations. This causality existence is harmonious with Javanese wisdom about integral relation between the creator and the creation; ananingsun marga ira, ananira marga ingsung, I exist since you exist and vice versa. The creator and the creation is inseparable and supporting each other.

Lung: Bangunjiwo village

Meditate upon the cramped room but unpredictable, leng, we will find equivalent understanding with creativity essence; realizing limitation and transform it into power, to be something new and unpredictable.

As leng, hole that deepening inside, realizing limitation, implying introspection, also the capability to look beyond oneself, what lies deep inside-the imaginary room which its depth cannot be compared to the dept of the ocean. Unpredictable. Old aphorism said “the depth of the ocean can be measured but no one knows what lies in someone’s heart”, this also explains the boundless potential of ‘inside universe’ in every personality.

Lung: Bangunjiwo village

People’s action (including creativity), therefore, marks its presence and meaning. Meanwhile, all effort to be present, to establish, is nothing else but self projection which assume bigger and spreading movement. Like lung, spiralling upward of plant.

We know that lung is the lengthening of the beginning; its presence asserts the basic and prime existence. It is the form of the capability to manage plasticity, moving to approach the light, but still be aware and willing to flexibly wriggle when something stiff and hard blocking the way or even crash. Plasticity is the ability to adapt. Lung sticks outward, like extending hand-not to ask but to give. Since lung is also sinom, ulam, the mark of regeneration continuity, the birth of new entity, the young and fresh one, like hope.

Lung movement is not rebellion. It does not break and damage. It is the continuity, continuing the existing by adding something new, taking care of the old and cracked one and adding freshness which is great to see, balancing the stiff one with flexible ambience.

A Javanese contemplator, Ki Ageng Suryamentaram, once used lung as the symbol of adaptation life attitude: genah wayah, empan papan — how we act and put ourselves properly in the right time and place. His teaching about mulur-mungkret beside contains the advice about the irritability ability, can also be interpreted as sceptical behaviour which always questioning about the existing and the coming ones, for the sake of mind and action maturity.

In the creative process, mulur-mungkret means the capability to mobilize and restrain. Creating can only be accomplished by mobilizing one’s capability and on the other side creativity also requires the awareness in the right proportion. If it is so, then the capability to restrain becomes an important factor in creative process, so that the creating desire still stays in its track, humble, and properly.

From leng, the world’s womb, we were born, we walk, and we look for direction. Then, adopting the lung dance, lengthening and getting bigger, we act and worship. As lung we are yearning for the light, realizing our petty minded while longing for the perfection of The Great Enlighten. Thus, we will never forget that the goal of our journey is going back to the beginning. Like the cycle of the sun, always gaze at the east when afternoon comes.

- Text by Sitok Srengenge

Lung: Bangunjiwo village

http://www.podtech.net/home/search/Rebecca+South

In April last year, Rebecca South, president of the Domes for the World foundation, was interviewed in this video podcast with Robert Scoble of PodTech on “how her non-profit is using unique building technology to built very inexpensive and durable structures for third-world countries”. Titled “Monolithic domes: perfect shelter for struggling cultures and impoverished lands”, I’ve posted here a transcription of the vodcast interview for those people in emerging countries with poor internet connections. I apologise for any inaccuracies in my quick transcription.

An interview with a local emergency shelter expert on the DFTW project village of “New Ngelepen”, or as the locals call it, “Tellytubby Village”, can be found on this blog here.

Thank you to Rebecca South and Robert Scoble for making the interview available.
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School dome at New Ngelepen, Jogya. Photo credits: www.dftw.org

Robert Scoble: …We’re back here in Salt Lake. So who are you?

Rebecca South: My name is Rebecca South, and I am the daughter of the inventor of the Monolithic Dome. I am also the president of the Domes for the World Foundation.

Scoble: Wow. Ok, “domes for the world”: are we talking about buildings, or …

South: Yes, we’re talking about dome buildings, we’re talking about 100% concrete rebar buildings. They’re uninsulated, so they’re only good for equatorial climates. They’re super cheap to build but they’re disaster-resistant, so we go into emerging countries where there’s over 5 million people without houses. So we go into these places and we start a project that’s completely not for profit, completely free for the people who we build the homes for, and then after that, we will continue in the country to keep trying to find resources. For instance, we just built a village in Indonesia, and now that we have the equipment and everything ready to go, and we’ve got 370 men trained in how to build the domes, we’re just going to keep going across the country because they need it so badly with the tsunamis and the earthquakes and the volcanoes.

Scoble: What’s the advantages of building a concrete dome over other methods of building a low-cost home?

South: Well, there’s a big effort there right now where they’re building these bamboo tents, basically. They’ll last about three years. For twice as much money as the bamboo tent, you can build this concrete dome. They use 50% less concrete than a standard concrete structure, and they’re super strong - they’re tornado-resistant, and they’re earthquake-resistant. That’s been proven over the last 30 years, we have all the engineering and everything to prove it. Plus, we can go into really remote areas where there’s no electricity and we can build and we can just use local labour that’s completely unskilled, and just show them how to build domes. And it’s worked out great there in Indonesia, like I said we have 370 people onsite right now.

Early stages of New Ngelepen, Jogya. Photo credits: www.dftw.org

Scoble: So how many domes have you built this way in emerging countries?

South: I think that you could probably count them under 100, but that was before I formed this foundation, which was last year. Our first major project has been in Indonesia. But we’ve built in Haiti, Kenya, Bolivia, South America, you know, we’ve built quite a few of these projects, just on a much smaller scale, and we’ve had to work with other non-profits. It’s actually always been a dream of my father to build en masse overseas, especially in South America, Central America, Mexico, and also in the equator, in Africa and whatnot, but he just hasn’t had anybody to head it up, until I took it over.

Scoble: Your company’s built domes all over the world, right?

South: Yes, commercial projects: it’s a different type of building. It’s a super insulated dome, you have to have skilled labour to build these domes. But they save 50-75% of your heating and cooling costs, plus they have the disaster resistance of the other domes, the EcoShells. Plus, they’re super quick to build, and as you get bigger and bigger domes, it’s cheaper and cheaper, exponentially you save. So we’ve built in about 48 states and 40 countries: schools and churches and storages and houses …

Scoble: Right, so the advantages are heating and disaster-related - are there any other aesthetic reasons to have a dome instead of a “normal” standard wooden house?

South: Well, most people would say there are no aesthetic reasons… but that is because they haven’t seen some of the domes we’ve built. For example, there’s this gorgeous dome on P—— Beach, it’s been featured on MSNBC, and NBC and the Weather Channel - and every time there’s a hurricane, they go in there, hunker down … But it’s built to reflect a seashell. It’s really beautiful, and it’s right there, like I said, right on the beach, and it gets prettier every time a hurricane goes through there and destroys all the houses around it! But it’s just gorgeous. And there’s another one, let’s see, out by Atlanta, on one of the islands out there. It’s called “Eye of the Storm”, they named it. It also reflects the look of a seashell. Yeah, you can do anything you want with them.

Scoble: You mentioned that the domes can be hurricane resistant - what kind of wind forces can a dome deal with that a normal house can’t?

South: Well let me give you an example, I can’t give you exact numbers because I don’t have them in my head, but when we originally - back in 1979, when I was 3 I was gathering intel, just by listening to conversations, but later I followed up and found out that they did the original engineering testing at BYU laboratories, down in P——, close to here. And they built a monolithic dome, and then they tried to break it. They piled it up with big bags of sand, and then they finally started loading like forklifts on there, they could never break it. They could never break it.

Scoble: The dome structure is a good one engineering-wise.

South: Yes, inherently, the shape of the dome, because the force of a tornado is distributed throughout the whole shell. My dad always says it’s kind of like a tupperware bowl, just sits on the surface. You know I’ve actually been through a tornado, in a dome.

Scoble: Have you?

South: Yes, I was at work one day, and a tornado came through, and it hit us directly, we could see it coming toward us, it hit the office building directly, and it snapped this giant phone pole, and it landed on the dome and it slid off, and we heard this big bang - but that was it. It got our dome a little dirty, the pole did, but the next door neighbours - destroyed. I mean it completely destroyed their huge half a million dollar metal structure, which was really sad, and we lost some boats, but yeah it hit us directly …

Scoble: What got your dad into this?

South: My dad’s just a renagade. He was working for the railroad in Chicago, he was programing in [?], back in the day. He had a slew of people, women, working with those puncher cards - I don’t really understand it ‘cause I have my PalmPilot now, you know - but he just decided one day that he was going to go back to Idaho and spray foam, so he moved back to Idaho and started spraying polyeurathane foam for potato storage insulation.

Scoble: Interesting.

South: Then he went to [?] with Bucky Fuller, built a couple of geodetic domes, but didn’t like all the waste, and he didn’t think he could build them big enough like he wanted to. So he came up with this airform (?) strucutre that you go in, and you go in the inside and you spray it with polyeurathane - you have to coat polyeurathane, so then you reinforce it with rebar and coated it with [?] - and there you have this super structure. And then from that first hideous potato storage that we did, we’ve evolved a lot through the years, you know. I actually grew up in a dome. I lived in an 8000 square feet -

Scoble: I’m going to call you the Dome Lady!

South: Yeah, you can - but I prefer princess … ‘cause my dad invented it, so I get to be the princess, right? no … yeah, I was 5 years old and we moved into our first dome house, it was 8000 square feet. He built it so big so that he could show people that it could be more than just a potato storage. And he had ten kids. I’m number 7. So I gave tours by the time I was five…talking about the r-values of the dome, its r-value of ..60.

Scoble: And what does that mean?

South: It doesn’t mean squat, really, except for that you can use the same heater that you use to heat my sister’s trailer house that was by it, in our house, in an 8000 square foot dome house. You use the exact same heater.

Scoble: So it’s very insulated.

South: Super insulated. And it works just the same way in Texas, in the hot country. I actually lived in an 800 square foot house, but much smaller, down there in Texas for a while and my air-conditioner was the same as an RV air-conditioner. In fact, it was an RV air-conditioner.

Scoble: So if I want to build a dome house in the middle of Silicon Valley, how much does it cost compared to a standard everyday wood house?

South: If you’re going to build a fancy house in Silicon Valley, it’s going to be exactly the same as a regular house, because mostly it has to do with what you do on the inside. Now if you’re going to build an arena, then you go from ten billion dollars down to about 5 million dollars cost. Exponentially - as the size gets bigger, the savings get bigger.

Scoble: Interesting. That’s why Tecoma has a dome?

South: Yes, well, not a monolithic dome, but we’re on the trail, we’re going to build our first hockey rink here in a little bit. But it’s on the down low so I can’t tell you where …

Scoble: Ok .. We’ll be sitting in a hockey game some day in one of your domes.

South: Yes, but I’ve always worked for my father, except for five or six years, here and there, throughout my life, but this has been the most exciting thing that I’ve done - run this non-profit - because I’ve always sort of talked about it, and it’s been so exciting for me to go to these places and then see these families, see their lives change.

Scoble: Where can we learn more about the non-profit?

South: You can learn more about the non-profit at www.dftw.org. You can learn more about domes in general at www.monolithic.com.

Scoble: Well cool, thanks for coming out and telling me a little bit about your world and we’ll check it out.

South: Thanks. It was good to be here.

This post is addressed to the researchers, students and participants of the Human Ecology Forum at the ANU, who have very generously offered to discuss my research and consider some questions I’ve posed them, at their Friday meeting on 5 September. Thanks again.

To clarify this post, I am not looking for thesis-writing advice. This website is a place to gather together opinions, discussion and ideas. It is a broad-ranging playground populated by material relating to my research on bamboo, emergency shelter, disaster response and humanitarian work. The only place that I would appreciate comments on my thesis is directly on my thesis, in the section where I will post my draft thesis, which is currently empty.

This is a post to say hello to the researchers at the Human Ecology Forum, and let them know broadly what has become my life for the past couple months (and into the future). I am looking for engagement with ideas, any suggestions or ideas that people might think of: links to authors or concepts or websites, and also any comments on how this fits into the broader context of research into human ecology and their research in Australia.

I also apologise for not making something more easily digestible to the Forum format. Next time it will be a powerpoint uploaded on SlideShare starting with research methodology!!
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I’m posting the questions up the top here as well as repeating them down the bottom, for anyone who doesn’t want to have to read through the post again.

These questions are different from the original questions posed to the Forum.

• In the broadest context, this research is essentially about processes that enable humans to successfully solve complex problems. Don’t worry about the details in this blog post here: I haven’t given any. Besides this being a introductory post, I’m not expecting that anyone will find the details particularly scintillating unless you happen to be an emergency shelter disaster response coordinator with years working in sustainable construction and social work, living in Indonesia. I appreciate that you’re a group of intelligent, erudite researchers living in the whitest city in Australia, by and large working on issues that are important to highly educated, wealthy Westerners with access to worldclass standard knowledge repositories, and that your lives are far away from issues I’m looking at. We got any builders here? Disaster workers? No. But you know, we’re all humans, and as a global community, all of us face the necessity of solving complex, intractable, messy problems. The details and context will be different in every disaster, in every complex human problem. Why I’m interested in this research is because it’s looking at a formalised international process designed to solve one such extremely complex problem. Obviously policy is different to how it is enacted in practice, but policy and practice are both important. What I find most exciting that this is a mainstream approach to collaborative, complex problem-solving involving many different stakeholders with different objectives, set up at the highest international level and applied on a global scale.
  
  Most of the problems that we study at university are either critiques of how mainstream “business-as-usual” is fucked, or about how a really small case study was brilliant. How do you think that makes students feel? What kind of education is that? How about some messages about enabling students to create positive change, instead of teaching us simply to critique negative change?
  
  Any comments?

• I have learnt so much from talking to people here. In terms of learning about a subject matter, I’ve learnt more than I have in years at uni. As an example of a student who has gone through the ANU system (although my experience has not been comprehensive), why have I had practically zero training in fieldwork methods over my 8 years of study across 3 Faculties (Science, Arts, and Asian Studies)?
  
  It’s a fascinating comment on the forms of knowledge that we value.

• Does anyone have a comment on research blogging? I was inspired by the hundreds of daily visitors to the New Mandala blog, Bangkok Pundit’s blog on Thai politics (a thousand daily visitors), blogs like that of Peter Walker’s on getting humanitarian aid right, websites like Research Blogging and createchange.org: “Get More from Your Academic Research”, “How the Internet is transforming scholarship”, “A scholarly revolution is underway. It enables you to get a greater return from your research. All you have to do is share it” — is there anyone who is excited about this??

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Hello to everyone at the Human Ecology Forum! Thank you very much for spending the time to consider and discuss my research. In this blog post, I’m going to give you a short introduction to what I’ve been up to with my fieldwork and a summary of where my research is at. I then have a couple of questions for you.

Fieldwork, Indonesia 2008

Construction of a bamboo classroom in Ubud, Bali (Green School)

Since mid-June, I’ve been based in Jogyakarta, Java, and have also been spending time in Bali and Jakarta. I’ve been following around my primary informant, Dave Hodgkin, participating in workshops, research, fieldtrips, and many, many conversations, discussions and debates on issues around disaster response and humanitarian work.

Dave has worked in community-based housing and the sustainable construction industry for over twenty years, and was a Masters student and guest lecturer in the Human Ecology program at ANU. More recently, he has worked in emergency shelter and Cluster coordination in disasters across Asia, and worked in a number of significant roles during the Jogyakarta earthquake recovery, including technical advisor to the Shelter Cluster. He has lived in a small Javanese village in Jogyakarta for a number of years now, and speaks Indonesian. As a research subject, this means he has an invaluable technical as well as social insight into the mechanism of disaster response and an understanding of the local political and cultural context.

Two days after the earthquake. Photo: Dave Hodgkin

Through Dave, I have been talking to and interviewing a number of other people. 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 a number of Indonesian 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 talked to a number of Western and Indonesian academics conducting research on the Jogyakarta earthquake, bamboo specialists, and an Indonesian environmental architect working with bamboo as a locally culturally significant natural material, both in post-earthquake community reconstruction and as an artist.

Key events in my fieldwork have included:

• A consultative workshop on the humanitarian use of bamboo, with participants from the humanitarian sector and from the bamboo community. Strong representation from Indonesian NGOs as well as a range of international disaster workers, including the director of Red R India who came over specially for the workshop.
• Fieldtrips visiting environmental and bamboo NGOs in Ubud, Bali.
• A small number of emergency shelter experts from around the world who came and visited the house, staying up to two weeks, and becoming my key informants.

Main themes of my research

My research into disaster response is framed by the broader question of how do we as humans approach the complex socio-ecological problems, the “wicked problems”, that face us in our journey towards developing resilient communities and a sustainable planet. Although my topic looks at environmentalism and sustainable practice in humanitarian action, the broader context is really about unpacking the processes involved in one practical example of addressing a complex socio-ecological problem. The human activities that make up disaster response are extremely complex, triggered by a natural event and played out in the arena of human systems, including social, cultural, political, historical, environmental, international. They are characterised by high levels of uncertainty; high stakes; conflict; multiplicity of values, objectives and mandates; power dynamics and inequality; and often involve huge amounts of money. They can exacerbate existing problems like poverty and land tenure issues, and run under urgent time pressures with limited information. They are overwhelmingly whole-of-society problems, and cannot be satisfactorily addressed by narrowly-focused solutions.

Upon reading some of Val Brown’s work into collaborative social learning, this diagram immediately struck me:

From “A Collective Social Learning Pattern”, Val Brown, EuroPLoP 2008

This diagram of a “collective decision-making cluster” appears to be a remarkably apt description of the global Cluster system to disaster response. For those of you who this is new to, the Cluster system is a relatively recent initiative (circa early 2006) by the Humanitarian Reform project to enable a coherent disaster response by facilitating coordination between all actors: aid agencies, government, community, with technical and strategic input. There are eleven global clusters including Shelter, Health and WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene). The Cluster system was used particularly successfully in my case study, the shelter response following the Jogyakarta earthquake May 2006.

Because of this, I thought that it would be fascinating to consider a case study of the Cluster system as an example of integrative, holistic, collaborative problem-solving. Obviously it wasn’t perfect, but the formal and informal processes established with this goal in mind make it an interesting real-life example.

As well as this being a useful way to discuss the relationships between actors in the shelter response in my case study, it is also useful to describe my research process. I have been talking to many individuals about their experiences; to disaster management specialists; to people about organisational and institutional parameters of aid organisations and government, and to people about community perceptions, values and experiences. Belonging to none of these positions, and writing a synthetic analysis, my position stands firmly as a holistic voice.

My research is focusing squarely on international humanitarian response, although there are many other actors in a disaster response. Communities affected by disasters will always be forced to respond as best they can; national governments may have greater or lesser degrees of preparedness and available resources, and depending on the environment, may be struck by more or less predictable disasters. However only the humanitarian sector is an institution expressedly set up for the purpose of responding to disasters; international humanitarian response will follow disasters, wherever they are. In this sense, the many-stranded and complex entity of international disaster response is one mechanism that humanity has come up with to deal with large-scale disasters. The Cluster system is the current global system to coordinate and facilitate that response.

Because of this, I am focusing on interviewing disaster workers. Not only do they tend to have the most comprehensive knowledge of the complexities of the system of disaster response, but they also tend to have an adequate appreciation of the role, perceptions and opinions of government and community sectors. My perception is that talking to someone who spent six months working intimately with a number of communities, and who speaks my language, is going to be more insightful than me visiting one community (out of 8,000) to whom I am a stranger; ditto for government perspectives.

Tension between environmental imperatives and humanitarianism

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Within this broader context, I am looking at the conflict between environmental and humanitarian imperatives in a disaster response. There are many potential areas for conflict in a disaster response: between community-based approaches guided by local knowledge and approaches driven by the globalised knowledge of disaster experts, between the different objectives and agendas of different actors in a disaster response, etc. The inherent tension between considering (longer-term) environmental implications and urgent humanitarian principles is just one example, but an interesting one to look at because of the overwhelming emphasis on humanitarianism across aid agencies. On the whole, international disaster response is carried out by aid agencies with a clear humanitarian mandate. In the high-pressure urgency of disaster response where human lives at stake, environmental considerations come in much lower in the list of priorities. The environmental impact of disaster response itself is rarely the subject of serious consideration: disaster response often seems to sit somewhere outside of considerations of the global sustainability agenda. Furthermore, considerations of the longer-term effect of the response on affected communities is less of a priority, even though the local environment obviously plays a critical role in people’s post-disaster recovery.

My research focuses on emergency shelter, which uses a globally significant amount of timber, concrete, steel, bamboo etc. every year. For example, the annual timber harvest in Bangladesh is 3 million tons; annually, Bangladesh uses 4 million tons. The post-tsunami shelter response in Aceh used 8 million cubic tons of timber. If the choice could be made to use bamboo, or rammed earth, or other locally appropriate sustainable housing techniques, massive improvements in the environmental impact of disaster response could be made.

Systemic mapping of a disaster response

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Conceptual mapping of disaster response

While it could sound relatively straightforward to establish the environmental benefits of using bamboo, for example, the processes involved in actually making that happen in a disaster response is incredibly complex. Any kind of environmental analysis is meaningless without an understanding of the complex operating environment of a disaster response. It is not just context! It is an integral part of understanding the problem. If you were all disaster management practitioners, it would not be important to have a section like this. But unless a diagram like the one above is already in your head (I know you can’t see it close up, there will be a blog post on it soon), a discussion of disaster response in general is important. For that reason, the first part of my research is to develop a broad overview of disaster response: who are the actors, what are the relationships between them, and what are the main issues involved in disaster response (generally, not specific to Jogya).

To this end, I’ve drafted a conceptual diagram of all the issues discussed by all my informants in our many conversations. I sat down one day with a disaster worker who was finishing 4 years working in Aceh, made cards of all the elements that had come up in discussions, and played with them on a large piece of paper. 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”.

Use of bamboo in transitional shelter in the Jogyakarta earthquake

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The second aim of the fieldwork is to explore efforts towards sustainable practice in 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 - effects which are still being debated - 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.

T-shelter, Jogyakarta shelter response

In an earlier blog post, I outlined the issues as:

“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.”

So to sum it up, what I’m looking at 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.

The specific research question is something like:

Does the struggle for environmentally sustainable disaster response (as exemplified in the Jogyakarta shelter response) within the global Cluster system offer a useful model of collaborative, integrative and holistic problem solving?

The main sections of the thesis will be to:

• Develop a systemic understanding of the relationships, complexities and challenges of international disaster response (focusing on the international humanitarian sector)

• Analyse the use of bamboo in transitional shelter in the Jogyakarta shelter response, as an example of efforts towards sustainable practice

Collaborative research process

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The final aspect of note regarding my research is this website. My aim has always been to work on something practical that has meaning to people working in the field, and not being an expert in this area, this has meant that the process of eliciting feedback and opinions has been very important for me. After spending my first 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.

Questions for you!

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People waiting for assistance from flooding in Bangladesh, December 2007

These questions are different from the original questions posed to the Forum.

• In the broadest context, this research is essentially about processes that enable humans to successfully solve complex problems. Don’t worry about the details in this blog post here: I haven’t given any. Besides this being a introductory post, I’m not expecting that anyone will find the details particularly scintillating unless you happen to be an emergency shelter disaster response coordinator with years working in sustainable construction and social work, living in Indonesia. I appreciate that you’re a group of intelligent, erudite researchers living in the whitest city in Australia, by and large working on issues that are important to highly educated, wealthy Westerners with access to worldclass standard knowledge repositories, and that your lives are far away from issues I’m looking at. We got any builders here? Disaster workers? No. But you know, we’re all humans, and as a global community, all of us face the necessity of solving complex, intractable, messy problems. The details and context will be different in every disaster, in every complex human problem. Why I’m interested in this research is because it’s looking at a formalised international process designed to solve one such extremely complex problem. Obviously policy is different to how it is enacted in practice, but policy and practice are both important. What I find most exciting that this is a mainstream approach to collaborative, complex problem-solving involving many different stakeholders with different objectives, set up at the highest international level and applied on a global scale. Most of the problems that we study at university are either critiques of how mainstream “business-as-usual” is fucked, or about how a really small case study was brilliant. How do you think that makes students feel? What kind of education is that? How about some messages about enabling students to create positive change, instead of teaching us simply to critique negative change?
  
  Any comments?

• I have learnt so much from talking to people here. In terms of learning about a subject matter, I’ve learnt more than I have in years at uni. As an example of a student who has gone through the ANU system (although my experience has not been comprehensive), why have I had practically zero training in fieldwork methods over my 8 years of study across 3 Faculties (Science, Arts, and Asian Studies)?
  
  It’s a fascinating comment on the forms of knowledge that we value.

• Does anyone have a comment on research blogging? I was inspired by the hundreds of daily visitors to the New Mandala blog, Bangkok Pundit’s blog on Thai politics (a thousand daily visitors), blogs like that of Peter Walker’s on getting humanitarian aid right, websites like Research Blogging and createchange.org: “Get More from Your Academic Research”, “How the Internet is transforming scholarship” — is there anyone who is excited about this??

This research website does form part of my ethics-approved research process, so any comments that people make may formally contribute to my research material (although I won’t quote from anyone who hasn’t signed a consent form).

Thanks again to everyone for your continued support and encouragement. It is really appreciated.

Frangipanis from the Javanese cemetary next door