Resettling, disconnecting or displacing? Attending to local sociality, culture and history in disaster settings

Abstract

In many disaster settings, top-down responses emphasise 'expert-led' solutions that often involve relocating disaster-affected communities. While the intention might be to move people from harm's way and facilitate recovery, failure to attend to local pre-disaster circumstances as well as the interplay between power, resilience and vulnerability within and around affected communities often sees resettlement reconfigure as displacement or disconnection. This oversight may even usher in a new phase of dispossession and disadvantage for marginalised groups (particularly in colonial settings). This paper explores experiences in Australia, Japan and Taiwan to reflect on what issues of local sociality, local culture and local resilience need to be attended to in framing 'better' disaster responses.

Decolonizing People, Place and Country: Nurturing Resilience across Time and Space

“…Structural racism, historic injustices, dispossession, violence and the normal features of colonial contexts create very different risk landscapes for Indigenous peoples. Even well-intentioned actions reinforce and produce vulnerability [2,[10][11][12][13].…”

Resilience Unfiltered

“…To overcome these concerns, adhere to the principles of the Manifesto, and respond to calls to contextualise resilience, this study is led by local researchers to examine local conceptions and articulations of resilience by disaster-affected people from the grassroots level in Tacloban City. As Haiyan survivors, the two local researchers have experienced at first hand how local perceptions and experiences are filtered through external expert and professional opinions to conform to humanitarian agendas (Hsu et al, 2019;Murphy et al, 2018). In the case of Haiyan, it was clear that the concept of resilience that was behind most of the recovery programming was constructed through humanitarian organisations and foreign experts.…”

“…As such, disaster resilience remains a filtered concept because of the lack of context of the term as it is interpreted and implemented for disaster-affected households by non-locals (Hsu et al, 2019;Atienza et al, 2019). The absence of a direct translation of resilience in the local Waray language may create filtered and out-of-context notions of the concept.…”

“…With local researchers leading the research rather than external researchers, they begin to unfilter the concept through local narratives and cultural contexts through the exposure of their own localities at risk and local disasters (Gaillard, 2018;Murphy et al, 2018). The filtered root causes of vulnerability and capacities of local people are uncovered when research is framed from locally appropriate and culturally grounded perspectives of local experts (Hsu et al, 2019;Su and Le Dé, 2020). Despite the resilienceoriented interventions made by humanitarians, Haiyanaffected households in Tacloban City, Philippines still perceived resilience based on their local contexts, anchored on their needs and priorities.…”

“…The definition of resilience under the framework includes 'the ability of a system, community or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate, adapt to, transform, and recover from the effects of hazards in a timely and efficient manner, including through the preservation and restoration of its essential basic structures and functions through risk management' (UNDRR, 2020:11). The objective and 'expert-led' definition of key terms on DRR such as resilience creates an operational gap in achieving an inclusive and contextualised climate and disaster risk plan that the United Nations Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework emphasises (UNDRR, 2020; Hsu et al, 2019). The Cooperation Framework demonstrates the value of climate and disaster-risk informed development while supporting communities in using climate and disaster risk management approaches to build disaster resilience (UNDRR, 2020).…”