Concepts and methodology

5.1.1 Affected people as ‘social actors’

Every culture and religion has produced arrangements to protect the most vulnera-ble inside their community, to cope with disasters, to regulate violence and to con-tain war (Meriboute, 2004; Anderson and Woodrow, 1989). This chapter starts from the premise that people have ‘agency’. This means that people have the capacity to process social experience and device ways of coping with life, even under the most extreme forms of coercion (Long, 1992: 22). The term ‘human agency’ refers to the blend of goals, aspirations, power, and organizing capacities which people combine in their problem-solving, survival and development strategies (ibid). Although people have alternative ways to shape their coping strategies and to formulate their objec-tives, it is important to point out that people’s strategies are culturally embedded which influences their interactions with others. People are ‘social actors’, meaning that they draw their strategies from their individual rationality, but equally from their structural location in society. People’s agency and consequently their chosen coping strategies are related to their social position in society and prevailing cultural norms. Local people’s perspectives on risk therefore vary greatly across countries, within villages, and between men and women.

5.1.2 Local risk perceptions, local knowledge and local practice

CBDRR-literature emphasizes the importance of people’s existing capacities including local knowledge - also referred to as indigenous knowledge. It is assumed that the use of local knowledge will improve disaster risk reduction policies and project implementation (UNISDR, 2008). The UNISDR refers to local knowledge as practices developed by a group of people from an advanced understanding of the local

environment, which has been formed over numerous generations of habitation (2008:

vii). The UNISDR distinguishes local knowledge from other types of knowledge in that it originates from the community, that it is disseminated through informal means, it is collectively owned, subject to adaptation, and embedded in a community’s way of life as a means of survival. Most common examples of the use of local knowledge are indigenous warning signals for impending danger, and building techniques to with-stand typhoons, floods and earthquakes. Local knowledge and practice further refer to mutual help systems like bayanihan in the Philippines, gotong royong in Indonesia and ashar in Afghanistan to mobilize community labour, to specific values and rituals to create harmony or to justify defence in conflict situations, to routines to dismantle and hide assets, or to farm in groups as a form of protection against violence.

As the local narratives in this chapter show, however, local or indigenous knowledge shouldn’t be romanticized; it has its limitations and can even be dangerous. Further, local knowledge is not simply a reflection of people’s environment, but rather con-structed in social processes (Jansen, 1998; Hilhorst, 2004). Jansen (1998) distin-guishes three views on local knowledge which Hilhorst modified to the field of

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ter management (Hilhorst, 2004). These three ways of looking at local knowledge are relevant for analysing people’s local risk perceptions:

1. The first one is the instrumental view that sees ‘local knowledge as a barrel of knowledge’ that can be tapped for reducing risks. This instrumental view reso-nates with the definition of UNISDR.

2. The second view positions ‘local knowledge in contrast to modernization’, assum-ing that local knowledge blends nature with culture and that it can inspire re-sistance to western, colonial or outsiders’ ideas. The revival of ‘adat’ (custom, tradition) in post-Suharto Indonesia fits in this view. Adat is associated with his-tory, land and law, with order and consensus. Here, revival of adat has, among others, the strategic purpose to oppose land appropriation by the state for mining, timber, plantations, and transmigration (Henley and Davidson, 2008).

3. The third view closely relates to the second view: local knowledge as a source of political-economic empowerment of local people, instrumental to mobilize people.

It stresses participatory societal change aimed to address the root causes of people’s vulnerability.

Hilhorst points out that these three views share the assumption that local knowledge is homogeneous, shared by the community and can be separated from outside knowledge, and that this assumption is problematic (2004: 62). She refers to the fact that not everybody in the village possesses the same knowledge, or shares the same ideas about nature, disasters or risks. Sticking to the adat example, different

interpretations of adat exist locally between and within villages causing tensions rather than consensus as will come out of the local narratives from Maluku. Also the local narratives from Afghanistan show diversity in risk views and ideas about the same risk events. So, people’s local knowledge inherently is diverse and conflictive, which they express through their varying risk perceptions and which result in differ-ent risk practice and responses.

Further, local knowledge is never purely local. People construct their knowledge through interaction with their neighbours, through social networks, from what they hear on the radio or in the market, or through seasonal migration. In this way local knowledge is not an accumulation of facts, but “the result of a great number of deci-sions and selective incorporations of previous and new ideas, beliefs and images”, and at the same time deleting other possible frames of understanding (Arce and Long, 1992: 211). In the same way people construct their risk perceptions. They do not only take into account the possible exposure to danger and future damages, but they also consider their resources, knowledge, skills, past experiences, opportunities and alternatives, as well as weighing the different probabilities of things happening and the consequences of their risk-decisions. As local knowledge and risk percep-tions get constructed in social processes, power relapercep-tions play a role as well. Some people are much better positioned to obtain knowledge than others, and can make their interpretations of events and processes authoritative in the community

(Hilhorst, 2004). Similarly some are in a better position to articulate and define their risk perception than others, and - as explained in chapter 4 - whoever controls the definition of risk, controls the solution to the problem at hand (Slovic, 2003). Local knowledge is therefore also partial.

5.1.3 How to analyse different local people’s perceptions and their agency?

In Afghanistan and Indonesia, most people affected by disasters and conflict do not write their stories down, and are seldom heard because they have little voice in the events that determine their lives. Aid practitioners do talk to affected people, but basically with the aim to collect facts and figures about immediate disaster impact and short-term needs, not necessarily to understand how people make sense of these recurrent events, or how they use their various resources to mitigate or over-come crisis (IFRC, 2004). To understand how people ascribe meaning to events like disasters and conflict, to interpret silence and distortions in their stories, I used ‘oral histories’ and ‘story-telling’ as a method for data collection (Leydesdorff et all, 1999).

Personal stories of survival are an important addition to the official narratives about, for instance, the conflict in Afghanistan or the recurrent floods and landslides in Indonesia. Life stories are a source of knowledge about how people perceive their circumstances, how they portray themselves, how they put their lives in a historical perspective beyond the current situation, how they manage to build a new life and what meaning they attach to outside aid. People, however, may change their story, or omit specific traumatic events or feelings of guilt and shame, as I experienced in Maluku. Sometimes the researcher poses new questions to people who experienced the event and a new process of sense-making may start. Talking to people through informal conversations or interviews can be used, on one hand, ‘to collect infor-mation’ but also ‘to study story-telling, and to listen for meaning’ (Leydesdorff, 2007;

Nuijten, 2003). ‘Listening for meaning’ can be done through listening to the narra-tor’s moral language. Sometimes feelings or practice uncovered exceed the bounda-ries of acceptable or expected behaviour according to the prevailing norms

(Anderson and Jack, 1991: 24). The researcher should further be attentive to meta-statements, referring to moments in the interview when people stop talking, look back and comment on what they just said or thought, and to the logic of the narra-tive (ibid). This refers to contradictions, or silences, to events crucial to understand the person’s story and current feelings, but which are consciously omitted from the story. Since local knowledge is partial, the researcher needs to listen to stories from different social actors, and analyse why their risk perspectives about the same event differ, which is part of the sense-making process.

In addition to oral histories and story-telling, I talked with people about their liveli-hoods and coping strategies, as a way to understand how they make a living and sur-vive in adverse conditions. This is referred to as ‘the coping strategy approach’ (Boås et al, 2006), which also recognizes people’s agency and that people do not passively accept their fate.

It is important to stress that the significance of people’s narratives can only be deter-mined in relation to the rest of the research material. Aside from the personal stories or small group discussions, especially with women, I engaged with the villagers through the CBDRR-pilots over the course of a few years. I met with them in differ-ent settings, in formal community meetings discussing risk, land and water conflicts, and prioritizing interventions, or during informal settings afterwards. I listened to how they talked and how they framed issues. Towards the end of my fieldwork I con-fronted people with what I saw as contradictions in their earlier statements and

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rent actions. Their explanations added to the meaning of the various life histories that were documented separately and vice-versa. In this way, as researcher, I inter-preted and re-interinter-preted life histories to discover patterns in people’s narratives, on how they construct local history, give meaning to disasters and conflict, how they manage uncertainty and survival, and how they perceive risk. All in relation to their position in the community and in society.

I made use of MSc research done in Halmahera and Central Java in the CBDRR pilot areas conducted by students of Disaster Studies¹. They stayed in the villages much longer and were able to unravel local perspectives on disasters and conflict. From their studies and my own fieldwork I distilled patterns of how people deal with risk and uncertainty and relate these to academic literature concerned with local level survival and coping. This is mainly literature focusing on livelihoods, coping and protection strategies, often written from the perspective of aid agencies.

The local narratives in this chapter do not yet reveal everything about people and their immediate environment: people’s opinions, views and practices are incomplete, and specific practices are not yet mentioned because these were disclosed in reac-tion to the evolving CBDRR-intervenreac-tion and not yet at the initial phase of the CBDRR pilots. Through the action-reflection cycles various layers of complexity got

unravelled, which will be discussed in the proper context and the scope of each following chapter.