Beyond Shelter after Disaster: Practice, Process and Possibilities

David Sanderson, Jeni Burnell, David Sanderson, Jeni Burnell

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317976967
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Biowissenschaften
• Categoría: Ökologie

Providing shelter after a disaster is recognised as one of the most complex areas of humanitarian relief and recovery. Some aid agencies have stopped providing shelter altogether after bad experiences, while those that do quickly become engaged in challenges that go far beyond the provision of structures alone. Yet with the number and severity of disasters set to increase, due to climate change and rapid urban growth, the need for approaches that work has never been greater.

This book explores the issues in three parts. The first, Practice, looks at lessons from past efforts. Part two, Process, proposes practical and effective people-centred approaches. Part three considers currently neglected issues such as disability, human rights and urban-oriented approaches. Through practical case studies and academic research, Beyond Shelter after Disaster critiques past methods and explores future options for improving practice in one of the most complex areas of post disaster relief and recovery.

This book was originally published as a special issue in Environmental Hazards: Human and Policy Dimensions.

Introduction

Beyond Shelter after disaster: practice, process and possibilities

JENI BURNELL AND DAVID SANDERSON

Centre for Development and Emergency Practice (CENDEP), School of the Built Environment, Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane, Oxford OX3 0BP, UK

To say that the provision of shelter after disaster by humanitarian aid actors is costly, complicated and fraught with problems would probably be one of the greatest understatements in humanitarian aid. While often consuming large amounts of expenditure, too often the story of shelter after disaster has been an unhappy one. This year’s Humanitarian Emergency Response Review (HERR), commissioned by the UK Government’s Department for International Development (DFID, 2011, p. 25) to review how the UK Government should respond better to disasters, reached the same conclusion: ‘Providing adequate shelter is one of the most intractable problems in international humanitarian response’. Reasons for this include sorting land ownership, materials procurement, organizing engagement with those affected by disaster and, increasingly for urban areas, density, rubble clearance, governmental involvement (or the lack of it), space and coordination. This last point especially was singled out by the HERR as not working well in relation to Emergency Shelter Cluster¹ coordination.

To these ends, this Special Edition of Environmental Hazards: Human and Policy Dimensions aims to examine the complexity of enacting good post-disaster shelter programmes. The papers in this edition result from a 2-day conference, Improving Learning and Practice in the NGO Shelter Sector, hosted by Oxford Brookes University’s Centre for Development and Emergency Practice (CENDEP) in September 2010. Over 70 practitioners, academics – and sceptics – attended the event and covered a wide range of issues; some of the issues covered are reflected in the papers we have selected for this edition and range from urbanization, human rights and professionalization to construction, disability and theoretical understandings.

What though is ‘shelter after disaster’? For this edition, the term refers to temporary structures beyond tents, and efforts by aid agencies to construct permanent post-disaster housing. The HERR refers to ‘transitional shelter’ – a broad term for housing that is something better than a tent but is not (intended to be a) permanent structure, usually designed with an intended lifespan of between 3 and 5 years. Transitional shelter has become the ‘response of choice’ for nearly all large aid agencies in recent years. Transitional shelter, however, is now raising questions, with critics arguing that it too often becomes permanent, that it uses up valuable aid resources and that it spends political will and donors’ cash on short-term solutions that do little for addressing long-term problems.

In Haiti, following the devastating January 2010 earthquake, there have been real difficulties in implementing transitional shelter. Underpinning this has been Haiti’s intractably difficult conditions of poverty and governance that existed before the earthquake. At least one large agency cancelled its programme outright, while others have found progress to be extremely slow. An independent study commissioned by the UK Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) identified lessons learnt in the first year of operations of 13 of its member agencies, recommending that, ‘In recovery, prioritise the facilitation of long term homes over the building of short term transitional shelters’ (Clermont et al., 2011, p. 15), that is, that in effect agencies should rethink their engagement in transitional shelter. The authors of the report arrived at this conclusion after finding almost no support, within agencies or elsewhere, for transitional shelter as a useful solution – ‘Many informants, both DEC member staff and others, have been very critical, labelling (transitional) shelters varyingly as “a total waste of money”, “counter-developmental” and “suiting NGO timeframes and marketing needs” rather than people’s needs’ (Clermont et al., 2011, p. 15).

At the time of writing, some 800,000 people in Haiti are still living in tents, with solutions to the question of what to do still being seemingly far-off. An approach of the Government of Haiti to the resettlement of large numbers of people to new settlements, such as Corail, located several miles out of town, has been criticized as creating new, unserviced pockets of poverty. Strong among the critics is UN HABITAT, the United Nations agency tasked with urbanism and who at the time of writing lead the Emergency Shelter Cluster. UN HABITAT advocates the ‘safe return’ of affected dwellers to their original location (if it is safe to do so). Yet this also has its problems: if before the earthquake you lived in a four-storey block as a tenant, where, and what, do you return to? Also, if you were a squatter, or a renter, then what rights do you have?

Ian Davis opens this Special Edition with a candid reflection of his 40 years working in post-disaster reconstruction. As the author of the seminal 1978 publication ‘Shelter after Disaster’, Davis remains one of the key figures defining this field of work. Presented as a series of good practice principles, Davis’s paper combines his experiences with other shelter practitioners. A key theme highlighted within his paper, reflected in many years of experience, is that ‘relief is the enemy of recovery, so minimise relief, to maximise recovery’ (Davis, this issue, p. 194). As the shelter sector grapples with transitional and other technological shelter solutions, it is imperative that assisting people to recover must remain at the centre of good shelter practice. This is a lesson still being learnt 40 years on.

How then do shelter professionals improve people’s lives and living environments without creating dependence and increased vulnerability? Richard Carver’s paper explores the issue from a human rights perspective, and asks, ‘Is there a human right to shelter after disaster?’ By beginning with the idea that, in legal terms, the answer is yes, his discussion explores what this means and crucially whether it is helpful for better practice. Discussing the seven criteria for adequate housing provided by the Committee for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and citing instances from Haiti and the tsunami, Carver asserts that the human rights approach becomes particularly valuable ‘in the transition from the provision of shelter as an immediate emergency response into longer term reconstruction or development’ (Carver, this issue, p. 243).

A key question that has emerged since the Haiti earthquake (and which was central to the DEC Haiti study) is ‘What can be learnt for the next urban disaster?’ Since 2010, the issue of improving disaster response in urban areas has been the subject of several reports, journals and conferences. Already a growing amount of work is taking place in this area, such as the Inter-Agency Standing Committee’s (IASC) recently completed ‘Strategy for meeting humanitarian challenges in urban areas’ which identifies strategic objectives for making humanitarian responses in urban areas more effective (ISAC, 2010). As part of this work, IASC has identified some 90 tools and approaches for urban areas, applicable to various themes and sectors, not just for shelter. This work is in recognition that almost all of the aid communities’ tools and understandings are rurally derived – we still talk of working ‘in the field’, even if it is a densely packed neighbourhood!

If UN HABITAT is right, then towns and cities are growing by some 1 million people a week. In post-disaster urban areas, shelter problems are compounded: density, confusion over land ownership, high-rise living and the presence of squatter settlements, often on poor-quality land, are just a few of the hurdles. Within this context, disasters are not only the shocks that occur after a sudden onset event, such as an earthquake, but, on a smaller every day level, are also the daily stresses that impact the lives and increase the vulnerabilities of the urban poor. Definitions of shelter after disaster therefore extend to reconstruction and, at times resettlement, of people living in vulnerable situations, often on marginal land, in cities and towns. Victoria Cronin and Peter Guthrie’s paper ‘Community-led resettlement: From a flood-affected slum to a new society in Pune, India’ explores this theme, providing a detailed insight into the challenges and complexities of dealing with shifting governance structures in the building of new houses for a community affected by disaster. Focusing on a community that was devastated by floods in 1997, Cronin and Guthrie describe the engagement of civil society organizations and, after initial positive engagement from senior governmental administrators and politicians, the frequent changes of personnel that led to a start and stop process that lasted for several years. While the eventual process took some 6 years before building began, Cronin and Guthrie conclude that the successful elements of the project ‘were very much driven by a collaborative NGO [non-governmental organisation] and CBO [community based organisation] partnership which enabled the beneficiaries to be in control of their housing situation’ (Cronin and Guthrie, this issue, p. 320).

Camillo Boano and Marisol García’s paper focuses on the recovery in urban areas in Constitución, Chile following the February 2010 earthquake. Boano and García point out that while cities can provide safe areas, they are too often places of massively enhanced risk, through poorly built buildings, ineffective building codes implementation and sheer density. Boano and García’s paper also explores the roles of architects in post-disaster recovery, and the shift needed by traditional architects away from being (to cite British architect Jeremy Till) the ‘interpretive agent’ to that of ‘transformative agency’. As part of this new skill set Boano and García note the need for built environment professionals, including architects, to promote ‘an understanding of the capacity of people to act’, that is, to build genuine participation and empowerment of people in design processes that effect them. In this way, Boano and García are echoing developmental specialist Robert Chambers’ long-standing question and challenge, ‘Whose reality counts?’ – the professional who comes and goes for a short period, or people themselves, whose lives are being played out in the very places that professionals seek to assist in?

To these ends, Boano and García are touching on the wider question of the skill sets required to work in the shelter sector. The need for professionalization within the shelter sector with competent professionals has gained traction in recent years, with increasing numbers of new training programmes, such as the launch in 2011 of Save the Children UK’s Shelter Trainee Scheme and a new Postgraduate Certificate in Shelter after Disaster offered by CENDEP.

If sector individuals need to have improved skills and competencies, then how do aid agencies improve also? Kelman et al.’s paper ‘From research to practice (and vice versa) for post-disaster settlement and shelter’ point to an absence of a meta-analysis of studies in this area. They highlight, importantly, the lack of ability for too many agencies to learn, observing that ‘aid agencies rarely analyse the impact of their post-disaster settlement and shelter projects’ (Kelman et al., this issue, pp. 263–264). One element for improving practice explored in the paper is improving the links between research and practice. Through an analysis of several disaster shelter responses, the paper discusses pragmatic issues relating to media interest (and its decline as time goes on), location and funding timeframe. Concerning the latter, they discuss trade-offs between quality and quantity, citing Somalia as an example: ‘In 2009, one project delivered improved but basic shelter with a limited lifetime to over 24,000 people. In 2008, a separate project had provided durable sites and services (not shelter materials), but for only 700 people over 2 years and with significantly higher project costs per person assisted’ (Kelman et al., this issue, p. 272).

Continuing the urban theme, Kate Crawford’s paper asks whether urban recovery interventions by agencies can change societal divisions of wealth and poverty, or merely reinforce them. She cites as an example the provision of shelter kits, where a requirement for such a kit is land ownership. To rethink conceptual understandings of working in urban areas, in particular relating to infrastructure, Crawford presents a critique of an interpretation of the sustainable livelihoods approach, arguing instead for more nuanced understanding that wrestles with the complexities that urban reconstruction presents.

Dealing with complex realities and those who are particularly vulnerable is explored in John Twigg et al.’s paper. Through a literature review, this paper explores the practice of assisting people with disabilities in accessing public emergency shelters. The findings highlight a general failure within many emergency facilities to meet the basic needs of disabled people during an emergency. Twigg et al. cite one specialist who observes, ‘Most disaster response systems are designed for people who can walk, run, see, drive, read, hear, speak and quickly understand and respond to instructions and alerts’ (Twigg et al., this issue, p. 252). Twigg et al., somewhat like Crawford, argue that greater understandings are needed in differentiating the term ‘vulnerability’ during humanitarian actions.

If temporary shelter is complex, then arguably more so is permanent housing, with similar challenges of land ownership, location, durability, safety and quality. Plato Jack Powell’s paper examines the pitfalls of post-disaster reconstruction through a study of several housing projects in India’s Gujarat State, 10 years after the 2001 earthquake. His field research compares the success (in terms of quality and appropriateness) of buildings which were constructed by either a donor or owner-driven approach. To elaborate, donor-driven reconstruction is a commonly used approach in which ‘donors – including governments, multilateral or bilateral agencies or humanitarian agencies – decide how and what to building and construct this directly or through contractors’ (Schilderman, 2010, p. 26). Conversely, owner-driven reconstruction requires that donors support people in the process of constructing their own housing in accordance with their personal needs and requirements. Powell’s paper emphasizes the flaws in policy leading to unenforced safe building regulations, which resulted, in many cases, in people’s vulnerabilities being increased instead of reduced.

Powell’s paper, like many others written on the above issues, highlights the inadequacy of donor-driven reconstruction to effectively meet people’s needs. Donordriven housing can fail spectacularly to put people in the centre. This failure is provided by the example of ‘World Vision Nagar’, a post-tsunami housing project built in India Tamil Nadu State. World Vision Nagar, as the name implies, puts the NGO in the centre, not the people. This focus on the provider is emphasized further: the NGO’s name is on every house (reinforcing to every dweller that their home is a gift from a generous benefactor), and most disturbing of all, next to the main entrance there is a billboard which depicts the wave that brought such devastation and a tearful woman. What a reminder of how the colony’s loved ones were killed!

Fortunately, good examples of projects that focused on processes (not products) and people can be found. After the Gujarat earthquake the Indian NGO SEEDS India trained local masons who spend time in villages rebuilding houses with local communities. The process took longer, but the outcome – houses designed and built with people in mind using local practices – were appropriate, and cost roughly half the price for houses twice the size compared to other nearby NGO-built housing.

The approach adopted by SEEDS India might be termed by Theo Schilderman and Michal Lyons ‘People-Centred Reconstruction’ (PCR). Their paper challenges existing norms of providing shelter after disaster and offers an alternative that puts people in the centre of the reconstruction process with the aim of making people more resilient to future risks. To achieve this, Schilderman and Lyons outline key components for achieving PCR and advocate that this approach ‘requires not just making their buildings safer to live and work in, but also make making people more capable to adapt to risk and change’ (Schilderman and Lyons, this issue, p. 227). It is an approach that aims to tackle people’s underlying vulnerabilities to disasters and, in so doing, to bridge the gap between relief and long-term development. For this to happen, both policy and practice need to be challenged. Schilderman, in a 1993 paper, ‘Disaster and development: a case study from Peru’, discussed this issue, concluding that NGOs have an important role to play at both the local and the international level. Schilderman sees NGOs as catalysts for developing innovative strategies for reducing people’s vulnerabilities while having ‘an even more important role at the international level, in challenging the assumptions underlying current relief and reconstruction work, and in stimulating a change towards a more development-orientated approach’ (Schilderman, 1993, p. 423).

Shelter after disaster therefore is costly, complicated and fraught with problems, and currently too many shelter programmes fall short. Hopefully this Special Edition will provide some contribution to this complex area of work. If the reader takes away anything from this edition however, it should be that good practice in ‘shelter after disaster’ puts people first – after all, whose reality counts?

Note

1.  For more information on the Emergency Shelter Cluster please refer to: www.humanitarianreform.org.

References

Clermont, C., Sanderson, D., Sharma, A. and Spraos, H., 2011. Urban Disasters – Lessons from Haiti: Study of Member Agencies’ Responses to the Earthquake in Port au Price, Haiti, January 2010. Report for the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), DEC, London. Accessed 31 May 2011. www.dec.org.uk/download/856/DEC-Haiti-urban-study.pdf.

Department for International Development (DFID), 2011. Humanitarian Emergency Response Review, 28 March 2011. Accessed 31 May 2011. DFID, London. www.dfid.gov.uk/Documents/publications1/HERR.pdf.

Inter-agency Standing Committee (IASC), 2010. Final Strategy for Meeting Humanitarian Challenges in Urban Areas. IASC (MHCUA), Geneva. Accessed: 31 May 2011. www.citiesalliance.org/ca/sites/citiesalliance.org/files/CA_lmages/IASC_Strategy_Meeting_Humanitarian_Challenges_in_Urban_Areas%5B1%5D.pdf.

Schilderman, T., 1993. Disasters and development: a case study from Peru. Journal of International Development 5(4). 415–423.

Schilderman, T., 2010. Putting people at the centre of reconstruction. Building Back Better: Delivering People-Centred Housing Reconstruction at Scale, M. Lyons, T. Schilderman and C. Boano (2010) (eds). Practical Action Publishing, Rugby. 26.

What have we learned from 40 years’ experience of Disaster Shelter?

IAN DAVIS

Centre for Development and Emergency Practice (CENDEP), School of the Built Environment, Oxford Brookes...