Natural Disaster Responses

1. Natural Disaster Responses XIMB Bhubaneswar November 6, 2009

2. June 2008 flood disasters Left: the Philippines Right: Iowa USA

3. Population density + natural events = disaster

4. Historical natural disasters in India and South Asia • 1970 cyclone East Pakistan (est 300-500 thousand dead) • 2001 Gujarat earthquake (Bhuj, est >20,000 dead) • 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake/tsunami (South Asia est 16,000 dead in India; 40,000 dead in Sri Lanka) • 2005 Kashmir earthquake (India and Pakistan, > 80,000 dead)

5. Some disaster terminology • “Victim” emphasizes helplessness, dependence, inability to affect outcomes • “Affectee” emphasizes holds open possibility of autonomous activity and ability to affect outcomes • Natural disaster studies do not usually include industrial disasters like Chernobyl meltdown (Ukraine, 1986) or Bhopal gas explosion (Madhya Pradesh,1984), but the analysis is similar

6. What are “natural disaster response studies”? • Chiefly, they consist of interpretive narratives (thick descriptions) at all scales and all periods exploring shared features of vulnerability, agency, resilience and context • Narrative queries: How do affectees cope with their traumas and losses? Who helps whom before and after external relief arrives? Who abuses whom before an after external relief arrives? When does recovery begin, when does it end? Where does a disaster fit in a long chronology of disasters? • Interpretive queries: Why does disaster affect some persons/places more than others? What/who is responsible for the disaster? What losses are bearable and which are unbearable?

7. Vulnerability • Vulnerability refers to the absence of socio-ecological defenses, resources and capacities that can offer protection from the shocks of nature • Vulnerability has geographic /material components; disasters take place in specific natural settings and built environments. Natural hazards and natural disasters are complementary (but not identical) • Vulnerability includes social & economic capital such as social prestige, legal status, political participation, credit access, gender roles, market power • Vulnerability is a largely an artifact of human arrangements and activities: the conditions for disaster are laid long before it strikes • Vulnerability arises in historical contexts of (i) existing social inequities of life-chances, (ii) local experience of similar natural disasters

8. Agency • Agency refers to the ability of persons, groups and institutions to alter their circumstances by struggling against constraints. The opposite of agency is helplessness, victimization • Tsunami examples: climbing to safety, rescuing family members, retreating to a shelter or public building, soliciting assistance • Collective agency: group action in realizing recovery beginning with the family; collective agency works in competitive/collaborative environments of scarcity • Agency is not romantic: desperate crimes can be an expressions of agency • Complex agency: local relief efforts are combined with or overtaken by outside aid institutions

9. Resilience • The capacity of rooted social-ecologicalsystems to absorb shocks suchas hurricanes or floods so as to retain essentialstructures, processes, and feedbacks • Resilience is evidence of collective social learning; it has a temporal component based on earlier disaster experiences • Resilience also has a material component; like vulnerability, it takes place in specific natural settings. Example: Cuba and coffee in mid-19th century • Sri Lankan example 2004: palm trees were left standing after more rigid trees broke and were swept away. Resilient palm trees a place of refuge • Cultural resilience: implicit social and customary strengths, redundancies, rules and adaptations that are functional only under extremity. Example: “women and children first”

11. India’s Natural Centre for Disaster Management (NCDM) and National Institute for Disaster Management (NIDM) • To be completed

12. Politics and natural disasters • October 1970: Bhola cyclone, Bangladesh. Sheik Mujibur Rahman and the Awami League slogan “10,000,000 martyrs” in East Pakistan • December 2004: Asian tsunami. Sri Lanka, despite massive mortality (c. 10,000 dead) India becomes a donor state • July 2005: Hurricane Katrina, USA. US aid agencies completely bungle relief and rebuilding of New Orleans

13. Complex agency: “competitive humanitarianism” in Asia 2005-06 “Many efforts and capacities of locals and nationals were marginalised by an overwhelming flood of well-funded international agencies (as well as hundreds of private individuals and organisations), which controlled immense resources. Treating affected countries as ‘failed states’ was a common error [along with] gender- and conflict-insensitive programming, cultural offence and waste.” Tsunami Evaluation Coalition (2006)

14. “Disaster Capitalism”or capitalizing on catastrophe Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007); Gunewarden, Schuller & de Waal, eds, Capitalizing on Catastrophe (2008) - Calamity reduces survivors to the status of victims and elevates external agents to the role of saviors; later, when profligacy, inefficiency and profiteering are revealed, the public response is to be scandalised--but the “failures” & the outrage are both predictable: they are not failures at all for powerful interests • Institutional arrangements for disaster prevention and response serve the needs of governments and international institutions, giving the state ever greater power over citizens and would-be citizens • Disasters provide opportunities for extending administration and control over the lives of people; representatives from “citadels of expertise” come to reign over “archipelagoes of misfortune” • There are private-sector profits to be made in cleaning up disasters; as government responsibility to relieve disasters’ worst effects grow, so do profit-making opportunities

15. The problem of neo-imperial meddling “A victim of its own success, humanitarian action has become a political, economic and social stake in countries in crisis as well as in our own "developed" societies. . . There are those who want to make humanitarian action into a simple tool at the disposal of politics or of military objectives in the war against terrorism or those who see humanitarian action only through the prism of technical standards and cost-benefit ratios.” Christian Captier, General-Director, Doctors without Borders (2005)