INTRO | HIGHLIGHTS | FEATURES | INTERVIEWS | PERSPECTIVES
Residents queue for water.
At the moment do any ‘indicators’ for
resilience exist?
I think that we will be able to show that
there are some aspects of resilience that
can be operationalised. In Nepal they
have nine minimum characteristics of
a disaster resilient community. Several
of these characteristics are related to
governance, but they don’t focus on
the social aspects of resilience. I am
interested to see if we could assess
what is a disaster resilient urban
community in my PhD. The urban
context is increasingly important due
to the number and percentage of
people moving to urban settings in the
Global South. Urban areas are more
challenging for practitioners to work in.
The practitioners define community as
ward level, but that’s not completely
accurate because a community is
actually on a smaller neighbourhood
level according to people I interviewed
across two wards. So how do I combine
those two varying definitions? If you
ask the local people for their version of
community it also transcends space;
some of it is located in their immediate
physical space and some of it is in the
rural communities where they come
from, their extended families, so again
you have these different definitions of
community as well as resilience.
33
Bhaktapur residents learning about earthquake risk reduction techniques.
Since large-scale hazards like
earthquakes know no boundaries how
could countries with similar problems
work together in order to foster
resilience to environmental risks?
I think the ESRC/NERC Earthquakes
without Frontiers (EwF) project is
one mechanism for the exchange and
dissemination of knowledge between
different countries. So I hope my work
will feed into the EwF project and be
shared with countries in the wider
partnership. Research undertaken
by EwF to date highlighted that DRR
practitioners in Bihar are very interested
in learning from people in Nepal and
vice versa. There are already some
links between the two. I think EwF has
significant potential to help disseminate
findings adapting the learning into
different local contexts.
1
How is urbanisation changing Nepal’s
risk landscape?
Urbanisation is one of the most
significant changes that has happened
to Nepal in the recent past (after the
insurgency). There’s a significant
migration of people from the hills
to the roadside, and larger cities. In
my research I found that there is a
lot of academic discussion about the
urban and the rural but these are
treated separately. But my research
demonstrates how the rural and urban
are linked through family ties, the
remittance of funds etc. We have to
adjust how we discuss linkages between
the urban and the rural because they
do impact on each other’s levels of
vulnerability and resilience.
No matter how much outsiders
may tell people they are better
off staying in their villages or by
their roadsides, that’s not what
people want.
They want to live in the cities because
they believe they have better access to
health care, schools, and opportunities
for livelihoods; so people will continue
to move, but then when they do move
to the urban settings their risks change.
The Nepalese government is very worried
about that. The municipalities are worried
about it. The donors are also very much
worried about urbanisation because it
changes the profile of people, it impacts
the social networks that people have.
It impacts the housing stock. The new
housing stock that’s being built is for
the most part chaotic and is probably
not conforming to the national building
code. So you’re increasing the ɥͬ