Risk Returns

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national development priorities. They should also be able to rely on

funds from local government and communities. For example, after

the 2006 Yogyakarta and Central Java earthquake, the first housing

reconstruction programme for the people of Kasongan village came

from the government of the province of Bengkulu. Since these funds

were not sufficient to meet the housing needs, the community met

to determine a fair way to distribute them. They decided to use the

funds to purchase construction materials and rebuild the houses

themselves, organizing neighbours into self-help labour groups.

Members of each group worked together to rebuild each other’s

houses, one at a time, giving priority to houses that were in poor

condition and to those with elderly family members or children

under five. As a result, funding initially intended for 40 houses was

used to build 70.

Another option for financing recovery is to twin provinces or

municipalities. This involves pairing an economically strong local

government with a less developed one. China, for example, has

introduced a twinning programme that involves allocating one per

cent of the annual income and technical capacity from an economi-

cally strong province to fund recovery projects in a less developed

one for three years. For example, after the 2010 earthquake,

Shandong Province and Shanghai Municipality provided assistance

to Beichuan County and Dujiangyan City. They supplied funds to

rebuild schools and hospitals to higher standards and upgrade their

management and professional capacity, deploying some of their own

staff to the newly built institutes to provide on-the-job guidance

and bringing teachers, doctors and managers to receive training.

Twinning projects like this one are best established before disasters,

however, so as to be part of ongoing development programmes.

Building on cultural and social resilience

People and communities make decisions every day that influence

the inherent risks they face. Their choices are influenced by their

available livelihood opportunities, their living arrangements, their

treatment of social inequities, and the type of buildings they live in.

Some people will be more vulnerable as a result of social exclusion

or marginalization – or of cultural attitudes and a lack of capacity

to interact with government and the outside world.

Fatalistic thinking can also hamper preparation efforts – but

a disaster may offer an opportunity for people to change the way

they think if they are offered sufficient information and

options. In Indonesia, for example, up to two-thirds of

people living in earthquake zones considered this and

other major disasters to be ‘takdir Tuhan’ (‘pre-ordained

by God’). Government and NGO representatives from

faith-based and secular organizations have concluded,

however, that such beliefs are not lasting constraints,

but rather coping strategies. And even if a disaster is

considered pre-ordained, this does not imply that

mitigation is impossible. When religious leaders take

responsibility for explaining this, and governments

perform their proper duties to the community in a

transparent and accountable manner, perceptions can

soon start to shift.

Recovery thus provides an opportunity not just to

reconstruct physical infrastructure but also to build on

communities’ inherent cultural and social resilience. For

this to happen, however, those affected need to be involved

very early in the recovery process. Governments therefore

should develop standards and strategies for commu-

nity participation and input, based on social mapping

and a close understanding of community strengths and

weaknesses, so that programmes can capitalize on local

leadership and latent capacities, especially of women.

This community-driven approach to post-disaster recov-

ery requires significant investments of time and human

resources but results in greater client satisfaction, quicker

disbursement and local empowerment.

Recovery for resilient development

Resilient recovery means compressing decades of devel-

opment into a few years while reducing future risks. But

disasters themselves also offer opportunities – driven

by (albeit often short-lived) changes in attitude, techni-

cal and financial resources and political support. For this

reason, despite the stresses after a disaster it is still impor-

tant to step back and plan a resilient recovery based on

local capacity and the needs of the affected population.

Recovery offers the opportunity to address the underlying

risk factors from multiple hazards and ‘build back better.’

Pre-disaster recovery planning exercise at community level promoted by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government