INTRO | HIGHLIGHTS | FEATURES | INTERVIEWS | PERSPECTIVES
31
Mitigating earthquake risk and
building resilience in Nepal:
Interview with Hanna Ruszczyk
Hanna Ruszczyk.
EARTHQUAKE RISK in less-developed
countries such as Nepal presents
challenges to both practitioners working
in Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR), and
for academic researchers undertaking
research in this field. Nepal is located
in one of the most seismically active
regions in the world, where initiatives
are helping to raise awareness of
earthquake hazards and develop ways
to prepare for them. This involves
bringing together local and international
expertise on earthquake hazard and
risk, and empowering communities and
governments to build a more resilient
society to earthquakes.
Hanna Ruszczyk recently started her
PhD on community resilience to natural
hazards in Nepal and neighbouring
Bihar in northern India. Through her
PhD she will explore if it is possible
to operationalise the concept of
community resilience with the aim
of developing a set of indicators and
examples of good practices that might
be applied to different urban contexts.
In this interview Hanna explains some
of the findings from her Master’s thesis
regarding how resilience is defined
in relation to disaster, and, using the
example of the Kathmandu Valley,
explains how vulnerable communities
together with researchers and
practitioners engaged in development
and DRR, can work in tandem to reduce
earthquake risk.
You participated in the Nepal Risk
Reduction Consortium’s sponsored
symposium ‘Successes and lessons
learned in urban-community-based
Disaster Risk Reduction’ held in
Kathmandu. What were the key findings
from your Master’s research that you
presented to the NGO practitioners and
the government of Nepal?
My first main finding from my thesis
was that resilience as a concept is not
directly relevant to local communities.
It’s a concept that we from the west
have brought to communities. So when
resilience is translated into Nepali, the
phrase that they use is ‘to adapt’ or
‘adaptive capacity’. As another example,
in Indonesia the word used for resilience
is ‘resistance’, so it’s not a concept that
is easily utilised in the languages of
the communities we’re trying to work
with. Resilience in the Nepali context
refers to social capital to a large extent,
that’s what the practitioner community
focused on when they were working
with communities. People have a very
short-term focus in Nepal, their main
struggles are ‘everyday needs’, such as
dealing with only 12 hours of electricity
per day, chronic water shortages, or
precarious livelihoods.
Everyday life is very difficult.
People are not able to address, or
are not interested in addressing
a hazard such as a rare, highmagnitude earthquake.
They are more concerned about everyday
hazards, such as fires. So resilience
as a concept isn’t directly relevant
to local people. But it is relevant to
the practitioners that work in Nepal,
because they’re trying to support
communities to build their capacity to
be resilient to natural hazards, which
can become disasters.
What was the importance of social
capital to communities in Nepal?
My second main finding has to do with
social capital, such as who do people
rely on in times of trouble? Who do
they celebrate with? This includes their
family and neighbours. Social capital is
also found in new community groups.
In the cities, such as Kathmandu
and Lalitpur, there are women’s
groups that are organised by extended
families within a small geographic
area (ward level, the lowest level of the
government) and they help each other
through, for example, group financing
schemes. The government has begun
to ask these groups to get involved in
health education and also disaster risk
reduction awareness raising. These
groups are tremendous sources of
social capital.
What about the role of government in
people’s lives?
When we think about resilience, in the
case of Nepal, we think about linkages
between people, government, and
internationally driven projects. The other
main finding from my research was that
people do not have high expectations
from the government. People said, ‘we
take care of ourselves, we don’t need
the government for anything’, except
for the critical infrastructures, such as
electricity and water.
How does earthquake preparation in
Nepal differ from nearby areas with
similar problems such as Bihar?
There has been a tremendous amount
of work in Nepal on developing Disaster
Risk Reduction (DRR) committees on
a neighbourhood, ward and municipal
level, creating links between individuals,
communities, and government. These
Agricultural land disappearing for housing in Kirtipur, Nepal.
DRR committ ees are now starting to
establish their own plans to prepare
their communities in the event of
an earthquake, and how they would
address the reality post-earthquake.
The practitioners are organising training
activities at the community level, such
as light search and rescue, because the
first responders will be the community
members. It is unlikely to be the
government or the army; it will be the
neighbours, as it is in most countries.
So a lot of work and effort has
been given for training people in
search and rescue, and first aid,
preparing communities, and drawing
up evacuation plans in case of a
disaster. There is also quite a lot of work
being done in Nepal for earthquake
awareness. I am interested to see
how Bihar compares to Nepal when I
undertake my PhD fieldwork.
What is the role of practitioners
in defining resilience and how do
they correspond, if at all, with how
researchers define it in academia?
Practitioners use the phrase in their
work extensively. They prefer to consider
resilience as an inclusive phrase with
different definitions, and they are very
adamant about this. They do not need
a commonly accepted definition. The
reason is that resilience has allowed for
dialogue between different actors that
did not occur before, because people
were very fragmented in their DRR
narrative. There were the development
practitioners focusing on poverty and
livelihoods, and there was also the
emphasis in the climate change sector
on adaptation, adaptive capacity and
transformative change. So resilience
seems to be a concept that different
actors can sit around the table and
discuss. The academic understanding
of resilience is contested. There are
different definitions from psychology,
ecology, and economics, and resilience
as a concept has been around since the
1800s. It does mean flexibility and the
ability to bounce back. That concept of
bouncing back is the thread that links
the resilience discourse in different
disciplines, in what we’re looking at in
DRR and even climate change. It’s a
phrase that people fundamentally and
inherently believe they understand, and
so that also opens up ways or paths for
people to talk to each other. There’s
some interesting literature that has
come from the practitioners focusing on
how to operationalise resilience.