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Recovery with Dignity
We’re working to reduce the long-term vulnerability of marginalised groups across hazard-prone regions of India by investigating conflicting ways in which disaster impacts are portrayed within society, and the implications of those ideas for the success of disaster recovery.
Challenge
Recovery from disasters is an inherently prolonged and uneven process. In some cases, and for some population groups, restoring economic resources, utilities and welfare services can take many years, and individual trauma and social disruption can last much longer.
Strengthening approaches to recovery from both extreme weather events and non-climatic hazards is a crucial aspect of adaptation, bringing with it the possibility to strengthen overall resilience to climate change. Yet, across the world, long-term recovery is typically overlooked within policy relating to disaster risk management. Where recovery is included in planning, it generally is limited to short-term reconstruction rather than long-term intervention. Central to all of this are questions of what recovery means – what it should entail, recovery from what, by who, for whom and how?
Collaborations
In the “Recovery with Dignity” project, we have been working with the Indian Institute for Human Settlements to analyse the longer-term processes of recovery following cyclones, floods, landslides and tsunami events in three states of India: Odisha, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Drawing on multiple primary and secondary data sources, we have focussed on how different ideas around impacts, needs and recovery priorities emerge within society over time, and the implications of those representations for the success of recovery, especially for the more marginalised or low-income disaster-affected populations.
Insights
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The communities we worked with have faced successive disasters in recent times, mirroring the experiences of many people across hazard-prone regions of India. Support to strengthen their recovery and reduce their vulnerability to future hazards is crucial for many, yet the target groups we have been working with have faced multiple hurdles in meeting their housing, income-generating and wellbeing needs. Some of these hurdles have their roots in adverse representations of these groups by governmental and other actors and conflicting sets of priorities determined externally to the communities.
Following devastating floods and landslides in Kerala in 2018, for example, we saw contrasting and, in some cases, openly contested narratives emerging in society around the nature and causes of the event, the impacts and needs of the affected population, and the priorities and effectiveness of recovery processes.
In our interviews with disaster-affected people in India, we learned what they felt worked well and what did not, about how to avoid future disasters and their desire to have an active voice in shaping the factors that influence risk. We also learned how people can and do try to shift representations of their needs and rights, through creative arts and local media access, as well as through advocacy, litigation and protest.
Though there is much variation between disaster cases in this pattern of representations by different actors, there are some discernible elements that do tend to work together to generate an effect on outcomes, most clearly in the way that certain actions and priorities become constructed as a dominant narrative of how recovery should be supported. Commonly these focus on priority economic sectors or hinge around the important task of reconstruction of dwellings, but often in ways that not only side-line other livelihood and wellbeing priorities of disaster-affected people but also sometimes downplay or even negate the needs and rights of specific social groups.
Implications
Managing disaster recovery is a hugely challenging task. However, seldom do we see an impartial process of rehabilitation in which relative needs are assessed and prioritised, and from which holistic lessons are drawn about how to reduce future disaster impacts. Instead, we see the entry of competing viewpoints and interests, in which ideas are commonly politicised and contested.
Sustainable recovery is not well served if the ways in which impacts and needs are articulated lead to the effective exclusion of certain sectors, social groups and concerns from full consideration, or to the blocking of alternative perspectives such as proactive approaches to future risk reduction. Key in this, we maintain, is the need to shift representations of recovery to better match the needs and voices of those most affected.
“Disaster impacts are never short-term. When the immediate physical effects cease, when the last survivors have been rescued, buildings made safe, relief supplies set in place, and the news cameras have moved elsewhere, the crisis has not come to an end. How we think about hazard events, their causes, effects and how society constructs priorities for recovery can have profound effects on people’s chances to restore their livelihoods and wellbeing, particularly those for whom the process of recovery is an especially prolonged struggle.”
Professor Roger Few
About Us
Professor Roger Few, of the School of Global Development, leads the Recovery with Dignity project team, working with School colleagues Dr Mark Tebboth and Professor Vasudha Chhotray, and Dr Hazel Marsh from the School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies. Roger and Mark are also members of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.
The team bring together a wealth of experience in research on the social dimensions of disaster risk and climate change, including many interdisciplinary projects in close collaboration with geophysical and hydrometeorological scientists. Key in this collaborative approach is the recognition that the impacts of natural hazards, including extreme weather events, must be understood as a combination of both social and physical processes. Who and what is exposed to a hazard, and the extent of their vulnerability to its effects, is shaped by a range of economic, cultural, environmental, and political factors. These factors are in operation before the hazard strikes, and they continue to play out through its long-term aftermath.
Discover more
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Read
more...Chhotray, V. ‘A supercyclone, landscapes of “emptiness” and shrimp aquaculture: the lesser-known trajectories of disaster recovery in Coastal Odisha, India’ World Development
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Discover
more...Afterwards: Graphic narratives of disaster and recovery from India
Vineetha Nalla, Nihal Ranjit, Yashodara Udupa, Mythili Madhavan, Jasmitha Arvind, Garima Jain, Teja Malladi | 2022
Photo by Zohrab Reys Gamat
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