Abstract
What can disasters tell us about social life? How does centering the Philippines help us better understand disasters? In this edited volume, which emerged from a 2017 Association for Asian Studies conference session on ethnographic approaches to disaster in the Philippines, the editors and authors tackle these two questions.
The answer to both questions, we find, is: a lot.
Written from a wide range of perspectives—government workers, policy makers, academics, program evaluators, and K–12 teachers—the chapters in this volume document how disaster is interwoven with social life. That is, they analyze how people manage and respond to both the major disasters that make international headlines and those that are recurrent, shaping everyday lives.
In doing so, the authors stake a claim in what counts as disasters. Following in the line of critical disaster studies, what “counts” as a disaster includes not only “natural” disasters such as typhoons and volcanic eruptions but also everyday events such as flooding. What we see is that even so-called “natural” disasters are not natural, nor is being “at risk” for disasters. Instead, “risk” and disaster response are both socially constructed and constitutive of broader socioeconomic, legal, and political processes.
Although the volume is not organized into sections, across chapters we see both familiar disasters and similar approaches to analyzing how organizations and people respond, which both the introduction and conclusion theoretically tie together.
For example, Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 each examine Super Typhoon Haiyan (known locally as Yolanda). Chapter 1 provides an overview of the frequency and types of disasters that occur within the Philippines, details the organization of the Philippine Disaster Management System, and provides a situational analysis of Haiyan (Yolanda). The chapter ends with the authors calling for a distinction between two types of provinces in the Philippines based on their vulnerabilities to particular types of disasters: neutral provinces and seaside provinces, where the former are vulnerable to disasters such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides, droughts, and others and the latter are vulnerable to coastal flooding and storm surges, in addition to those disasters to which neutral provinces are vulnerable.
Chapter 2 uses the five principles of the 2005 Paris Agreement on Aid Effectiveness (ownership, alignment, harmonization, managing for results, and mutual accountability) to discuss the effectiveness of different disaster programs following Haiyan’s (Yolanda’s) aftermath. Chapter 3 turns its focus to a specific international nongovernment organization, Save the Children, and analyzes the effectiveness of its aid work when compared with the five priorities of the 2011 UN Children’s Charter for Disaster Risk Reduction: education, protection, participation and access information, safe community infrastructure, and reaching the most vulnerable population. The authors find Save the Children was able to address immediate needs and minimize immediate risks for children, although the livelihood, long-term programs were not.
Chapter 4 turns to local governments’ responses to Yolanda and the response to emergency housing needs. The authors found that “the deficit in post-disaster accountability did not exist not because of the absence of laws or policies but because of government bodies and leaders who were not citizen/end-user-focused. Hence, they failed to deliver shelter to the typhoon survivors” (p. 84). Chapter 5 showcases why and how some people decided to stay home during Typhoon Yolanda instead of evacuating, and the authors document how these decisions take place within a particular set of constraints and socioeconomic and historical conditions.
Chapters 6 and 7 examine the effects of, and responses to, flooding by those most vulnerable. More specifically, Chapter 6 highlights the resilience of older adults living in an informal urban poor settlement who experience food insecurity and flooding simultaneously, while Chapter 7 turns attention to how flooding affects children’s everyday lives: their education, work (collecting recyclables to help with household income), and play.
Chapters 8, 9, and 10 further examine how food is entwined with disaster. For example, Chapter 8 examines the sociopolitical and cultural history of rice and how the 1997/1998 El Niño drought brought about what the author calls a social famine, that is, “the absence of food or foods necessary for maintaining a much wider culturally defined sense of well-being,” which in this case is centered on rice (p. 166). Chapter 9 turns attention to how seasonal honey harvesters navigate the everyday, “slow-moving” disasters of uncertainty and risk, while Chapter 10 is a quantitative analysis of a fishing community’s resilience to the multiple disasters to which it is vulnerable.
Chapter 11 turns to how participatory and community-based disaster recovery looks like in practice through an analysis of how three barangays responded to the aftermath of a 7.2 magnitude earthquake, while Chapter 12 focuses on how people in two barangays cope with and adopt strategies to mitigate the effects of climate change–related disasters.
Overall, this volume centers the Philippines and the multiple disasters people face, documenting how governments and organizations can exacerbate or mitigate disaster effects and highlighting the varied ways people adapt and manage life in its shadows. From national overviews to detailed descriptions of barangay responses across the Philippines, we see the importance of interrogating differences across and within the country.