After the Disaster: Rebuilding Communities

 What is the relationship between a community’s resilience and its ability to cope with a disaster? How can one identify the strengths of a community? How can technology give voice to communities, fostering engagement and resilience in daily life and in responses to a disaster?

These are just a few of the provocative questions discussed at the
Retrieving the Wisdom of Those in Need: Community Engagement and Healing in Times of Disaster seminar held April 4–5, 2011, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. This gathering was the last of three remarkable seminars brought about through a part- nership of the Wilson Center and the Fetzer Institute to look at the issues that hinder and support efforts to revitalize community within and across boundaries.

The first seminar in the series—Community Resilience: A Cross-Cultural Study—looked at questions of community resilience. The discussion cen- tered on how to foster conditions that promote resilience and examined compelling examples of community resilience worldwide. We learned a great deal as activists who have devoted their lives to organizing slum dwellers and other poor communities joined together with other practitioners and academics representing a range of disciplines and sectors to exchange in- sights and share lessons learned from their experiences. During this seminar, we learned that there is a lack of precision in what is meant by resilience. A number of the participants pointed out that to say an area is resilient means that there is something positive to which it can return, but this is not always the case. So whereas resilience can be positive in some circumstances, the tone of the first meeting was that we need to understand that resilience can also impede the kind of deep social change that communities sometimes need to go through.

At the second seminar, Environmental Pathways to Peace, we built on that foundation of the discussion of community institutions, resilience, and strengths—even the challenges of resilience as a concept. Again the partici- pants approached these issues from very different scales, with widely varying tools, concerns, and views of how conflict, cooperation, and peace are de- fined. We focused on understanding how mutual interdependencies vis-à-vis natural resources, particularly water, were sources of both conflict on the one hand and cooperation and peacebuilding on the other. Among the many topics of discussion, the participants often focused on the complex relation- ship between funders and communities.
After these two seminars, it seemed natural to come to try to understand these issues in more depth—in particular, how recovery efforts support or impede community resilience in the context of both human-made and natu- ral disasters.
We were fortunate to be able to bring together a remarkable group of people from around the world for this seminar. Participants came from Bosnia, Burundi, Canada, Haiti, Kenya, Pakistan, Rwanda, South Africa, Thailand, and the United States. They represented a wide range of perspec- tives and professions: humanitarian professionals and community organiz- ers, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), public health professionals, and scholars.
Throughout the seminar, the participants spoke of their experiences and efforts with natural and human-made disasters and disaster relief and recov- ery. Although there were differences in aspects of natural and human-made disasters, we found that there were many similar issues regarding recovery and resiliency.
The participants shared some success stories, acknowledging the good work taking place and what can be learned from people doing this work. But most often, their stories illustrated a broken “system” of disaster relief efforts and the subsequent unintended consequences of this brokenness. Most often, they did not ascribe the problems encountered with disaster relief efforts to any uncaring or intentionally neglectful actions on the part of those involved. They acknowledged that those engaged in the hard work of disaster relief were largely well intentioned and were committed to alleviating suffering and helping communities on the road to recovery from disasters.
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AFTER THE DISASTER: REBUILDING COMMUNITIES
But it was also clear that at a disaster site, there were often problems with responders and with their perceptions of what was needed and their methods for doing the work. Though they were there, in principle, to aid those most harmed by the disaster and to help them get back on their feet, they tended to have flawed or nonexistent relationships with those on the ground, those most affected by the disaster. This often led to ineffectual and sometimes even harmful and destructive actions, policies, and plans. And it also tended to lead to efforts that worked against, or certainly did not en- hance, a community’s resilience.
The participants recognized the difficulties in reconciling the two some- times contradictory needs in responding to a disaster: (1) the need for speed, to move quickly in response to a disaster to save lives, provide food and housing, and establish order and security; and (2) the need to take the time to accurately assess and understand the situation in all its complexity, to grasp the needs and desires of the affected community, and to involve the community in the short and long-term recovery efforts. The participants af- firmed how important meeting this second need was to a community’s resil- iency and successful long-term recovery from a disaster.
Throughout the seminar, the participants struggled with this paradoxical challenge of needing to “go slow” in order “to go fast.” They examined how the tensions inherent in this paradox played out in many situations, and they sought to understand the perspectives of those involved and make rec- ommendations for how to address this complex situation in a way that could be productive for all.
Through the following excerpts from the seminar discussion and the seminar papers, we hope to share the remarkable experiences, insights, and wisdom of the participants vis-à-vis this paradox and other challenges re- garding recovery and community resilience in the face of natural and hu- man-made disasters.