Technologies of Recovery: Plans, Practices and Entangled Politics in Disaster

Abstract

Recovery practices following the loss of home, sense of security, space and possessions, have recently become a focus of UK government attention. How people recover from disasters is seen to have a direct bearing on individual, community and economic well-being, so that the recovery itself becomes a form of social change. A plethora of instruments: templates, checklists and guidance documents have been produced to effect this recovery. We term these 'technologies of recovery', which work within a wider context of disaster planning aimed at bringing order where much is uncertain, reactive and dependent on emerging relations between people, things and spaces. While such protocols are not necessarily unwelcome, they carry many assumptions. We show how these technologies are built from official, distal narratives, versions of recovery remote from situated practices or recovery-in-place. Official emergency planning builds on 'lessons' from previous emergencies, to be then applied to future crises. Knowledge that is situated, complex and partial is potentially useless because emergency planners seek accounts that don't depend on highly localized circumstances. From a five-year ethnography of both a flooded community and the development of government recovery guidance, it became clear that technologies or recovery became transformed and remade in localized practice when enacted by newly formed and precarious collaborations of residents and local responders. Operating alongside, and sometimes underneath, the official response, residents and local responders demonstrated a remaking of the politics of recovery. Introduction: flooding in Toll Bar, Doncaster, UKToll Bar is a settlement of 1,400 residents in Doncaster, South Yorkshire and is described as a 'village'. It lies in a bowl-like area in a part of the UK hit most severely socially and economically by the closure of the pits in the early 1990s following the 1984-5 miners' strike. In June 2007 parts of England experienced devastating and unseasonal storms and rainfall and South Yorkshire experienced severe flooding, with 48 areas of the large borough of Doncaster affected. In the borough 3,286 homes were flooded, with 2,275 suffering 'major damage' as defined by the local council and 283 businesses were also affected (Doncaster bs_bs_banner The Sociological Review, 62:S1, pp. 135-158 (2014),

The politics of policy practices

“…Detailed, ethnographic, policy-specific studies have characterised contemporary policies as, in themselves, increasingly multifaceted, complex and composed of thick, interconnecting relations and heterogeneous actors. The practices and processes of policies assemble sets of heterogeneous actors including humans and an array of technologies such as templates, checklists and guidelines (Easthope & Mort, 2014). Easthope and Mort (2014) point to the many assumptions carried by such technologies, and Harrison and Mort (1998) figure policies as ‘technologies of legitimation’ which act to distribute relations of power and generate categories of difference (see also Caldwell, 1968; Jasanoff, 2005; Scott, 1998; Waterton & Wynne, 1996; Wynne, 2001, 2002).…”

“…Since the Western financial crash of 2008, in particular, care governed through the public sector has been subject to punishing austerity measures and to audits (sometimes of care itself, see Singleton & Mee, this volume) that alienate those caring as well as those cared for. In more ambiguous, extreme and sometimes international situations the human impulse to care has come under intense pressure – for example in situations of war, disaster and immigration (Convery, Mort, Baxter, & Bailey, 2008; Easthope & Mort, 2014; Ticktin, 2011; Clark & Bettini, this volume). Relations and practices or ‘doings’ of care (Barad, 2007, 2102; Mol, 2002; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011) within such difficult and traumatised situations have at times become distorted, almost unrecognisable as care.…”

Children and Young People’s Participation in Disaster Risk Reduction

“…Social scientific research has shown over many years that disaster is not a thing or event, but a process -usually slower and longer than commonly perceived (Knowles, 2014), certainly messier and more complex than the traditional emergency planning cycle of mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery implies, and as critiqued by Easthope and Mort (2014). Our work, then, joins calls to question what counts as a disaster: when, how and for whom (with an emphasis on children and young people) a disaster comes into being.…”

From victims to actors: The role of children and young people in flood recovery and resilience

“…‘Flood apprentices’ gained prominence for positive effects on community engagement and resilience building (Whatmore and Landstrom, 2011). Easthope’s ethnographic study of community participation in, and transformation of, national recovery and resilience guidance in flooded Toll Bar, South Yorkshire demonstrated the power of local actors to mobilise their experience (Easthope and Mort, 2014). The longitudinal ‘recovery diaries’ produced by 44 adults in Hull following the 2007 severe flooding demonstrated a ‘flood recovery gap’ in that for many people the recovery process is more gruelling than the flood ‘itself’ (Medd et al., 2015).…”