Getting relief to marginalised minorities: the response to cyclone Komen in 2015 in Myanmar

Desportes, Isabelle

doi:10.1186/s41018-019-0053-z

Cited by 16 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…We found that most households had to rely on their own agency, assets and aid from non-governmental organisations, rather than state-authorities' support, to cope with Komen's impacts. This fits with perceptions of a 'marginalising government response ' and '[u]nion government […] neglect' towards the disaster-affected Chin population in Komen's aftermath (Desportes 2019).…”

Section: Addressing Climate-related Livelihood Riskssupporting

confidence: 69%

Cyclone Komen’s aftermath: Local knowledge shows how poverty and inequalities fuel climate risk in western Myanmar

Kmoch

Palm²,

Persson

et al. 2021

Reg Environ Change

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Cyclones and other extreme events exert increasing pressure on South-East Asia’s societies and put smallholder farmers at risk. Here, we draw on participatory causal-diagramming workshops, interviews and survey data, to provide contextually grounded knowledge about rural communities’ exposure and vulnerability to climate-related hazards in western Myanmar. By tracing how the 2015 cyclone Komen led to a prolonged humanitarian disaster, we show that climate-related risks in this area arise from the complex interplay of households’ pre-existing vulnerabilities, persistent farming challenges, extensive disasters and cascading effects, which disparately affect lowland and upland communities. The different household strata’s dissimilar vulnerabilities vis-à-vis Komen’s impacts were rooted in the distinct exposure of their production systems to landslides and floods. Pre-existing land-access barriers, land-degradation processes, climatic stressors, agricultural pests and diseases, and chronic lack of assets and food insecurity further mediated households’ vulnerability. Relief interventions did not stop the disaster’s escalation, although this could have been achieved with early technical and material assistance to address the cyclone’s impacts on farmers’ land. Targeted aid for households facing imminent food insecurity or debt crisis could have lessened engagement in precarious coping strategies and distress migration. A diversification of households’ livelihood and land-use practices and increased redundancies of critical assets and infrastructure could help to mitigate future cyclone-triggered disasters. By demonstrating the strengths of local knowledge approaches in untangling the complex interplay of extreme events with households’ everyday vulnerabilities and agricultural land-use practices, we make a case for more contextually grounded disaster risk and climate adaptation research.

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Section: Addressing Climate-related Livelihood Riskssupporting

confidence: 69%

Cyclone Komen’s aftermath: Local knowledge shows how poverty and inequalities fuel climate risk in western Myanmar

Kmoch

Palm²,

Persson

et al. 2021

Reg Environ Change

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show abstract

“…In such settings, NGOs often exclude highly stigmatized groups from their programming, expecting fundraising to be impossible. For instance, flood operations in Malaysia have excluded the Rohingya minority (Desportes 2019), relief operations in Yemen have excluded the Al-Akhdam people of African descent (Housing and Land Rights Network 2006), and NGOs in Pakistan have excluded transgender individuals from their aid programs (Rumbach and Knight 2014). We found that even when appeals emphasized the Roma ethnicity of beneficiaries, some donations were still made both in the experiment and in our qualitative data.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 71%

Fundraising for Stigmatized Groups: A Text Message Donation Experiment

2020

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As government welfare programming contracts and NGOs increasingly assume core aid functions, they must address a long-standing challenge—that people in need often belong to stigmatized groups. To study other-regarding behavior, we fielded an experiment through a text-to-give campaign in Greece. Donations did not increase with an appeal to the in-group (Greek child) relative to a control (child), but they were halved with reference to a stigmatized out-group (Roma child). An appeal to fundamental rights, a common advocacy strategy, did not reduce the generosity gap. Donations to all groups were lower near Roma communities and declined disproportionately for the Roma appeal. Qualitative research in 12 communities complements our experiment. We conclude that NGO fundraising strategies that narrowly emphasize either in-groups or out-groups, or fundamental rights language, may not be as effective as broader appeals, and we discuss implications for public goods provision in an era of growing nationalism.

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“…The data were thematically analyzed in two phases, following Braun and Clarke (2006). First, contextspecificities, historical pathways, and nuances were drawn out for each case (see Desportes, 2019;Desportes, 2020;Desportes et al, 2019). Second, contrasts and similarities were sought across cases (e.g., by revisit- Notes: Participant numbers refer to individual in-depth interviews, except for the counts of community members, who sometimes participated in focus groups.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Literature on LIC and authoritarian dynamics directs our attention to the structural and cultural means through which power and violence are expressed (Galtung, 1996). Everyday politics are central in that legal instruments, bureaucracy, and daily engagements with government officials or community leaders restrict or influence aid access, activities, and beneficiary selection (Desportes, 2019;Hilhorst, 2013). Authoritarian modes of control involve establishing restrictions but also instilling a culture of uncertainty and fear (Glasius et al, 2018).…”

Section: Disaster Politics In Authoritarian Low-intensity Conflict Settingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The present article draws on one year of qualitative fieldwork in Ethiopia (focusing on the 2016 drought overlapping with protests and a State of Emergency), Myanmar (focusing on the 2015 Cyclone Komen response and explosive identity politics), and Zimbabwe (focusing on the 2016-2019 drought coinciding with intense socioeconomic and political turbu-lences). A first phase of analysis described the uniqueness of the individual cases in three separate publications on Ethiopia (Desportes, Mandefro, & Hilhorst, 2019), Myanmar (Desportes, 2019), and Zimbabwe (Desportes, 2020). This article presents the results of the second phase of analysis, where the different contexts were brought "together and into the same analytical frame," allowing us to "think with insights from elsewhere" (Robinson, 2016, p. 193-194).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Disaster Governance in Conflict-Affected Authoritarian Contexts: The Cases of Ethiopia, Myanmar, and Zimbabwe

Desportes

Hilhorst

2020

PaG

Self Cite

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Disaster governance in conflict areas is of growing academic concern, but most existing research comprises either single case studies or studies of a variety of country contexts that group all types of conflict together. Based on three case studies, this article offers a middle-ground scenario-based approach, focusing on disaster governance in authoritarian contexts experiencing low-intensity conflict. Low-intensity conflict is characterized by intense political tensions and violence that is more readily expressed in ways other than direct physical harm. Inspired by Olson’s (2000) maxim that disasters are intrinsically political, this article explores the politics of disaster response by asking what is at stake and what happened, unpacking these questions for state, civil society, and international humanitarian actors. Using data from a total of one year of qualitative fieldwork, the article analyzes disaster governance in 2016 drought-ridden Ethiopia, marked by protests and a State of Emergency; 2015 flooded Myanmar, characterized by explosive identity politics; and 2016–2019 drought-ridden Zimbabwe, with its intense socioeconomic and political turbulence. The study’s findings show how framing and power processes in disaster governance—comprising state and non-state actors—largely lean toward the state, with the consequence that political interests, rather than needs assessments, steer who and what will be protected from disaster impact.

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Getting relief to marginalised minorities: the response to cyclone Komen in 2015 in Myanmar

Cited by 16 publications

References 36 publications

Cyclone Komen’s aftermath: Local knowledge shows how poverty and inequalities fuel climate risk in western Myanmar

Cyclone Komen’s aftermath: Local knowledge shows how poverty and inequalities fuel climate risk in western Myanmar

Fundraising for Stigmatized Groups: A Text Message Donation Experiment

Disaster Governance in Conflict-Affected Authoritarian Contexts: The Cases of Ethiopia, Myanmar, and Zimbabwe

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