The analysis from the field has shown that disasters play a discursive role in society. Firstly, as in the researched villages, disasters serve as occasions for people to legitimize or critique certain social claims which have material effects: that is economic gains (wealth, access to lands, housing, wages, livelihoods), or social control (patriarchal or exploitative social relations). Secondly, disaster risk reduction strategies initiated by the state also get implicated in these claims and counter claims: as we have seen in the case of the critique of, as well as the support given to, the building of the embankment or of the spurs and stud at Baundi. Thus, social constructs of what constitute legitimate entitlements or rights are played out as dominant or resistant discourses in and through disasters as well as in and through disaster risk reduction strategies. As social critiques, they also represent a social re-ordering in the making that is proposing possible ways in which societies could change. The analysis also shows that the subaltern and local critiques of the technocratic solutions resonate with Latour‟s insight: namely the need to build solutions from the association between humans and non-humans. This has implications for the disaster risk reduction strategies. In the first instance, what they suggest is the need for a more complex theory to understand and respond to a disaster. Complexity theory (Hilhorst, 2004) argues for a need to take into account the multiple realities characterizing the complexity of interactions between different actors – government agents, people, experts – who interpret disasters in different ways through multiple normative standards. Building upon Latour (2004a and 2004b), I suggest that these complex social interactions and discussions – between local people(s) (women and men belonging to different castes, class and religion)80, government representatives, NGOs, and technical experts: that is all of whom who claim to know the problem of floods and erosion and in the process „represent‟ the River Ghagra – may be treated as “matters of concern” (Latour, 2004b p. 232) and used to assessing disasters and risk reduction strategies. Latour contends that the notion of “matters of concern” adds
80 I take into account the main critique of eco-feminist discourse which suggests that all perspectives and
solutions need to be understood through gendered lenses. Thus I too emphasise the need to include the different perspectives of women and men of different social groups (caste, class) into any search for an ethically just solution.
179 social reality to the technical experts (such as economists, engineers) analysis and enables a crossover between experts knowledge and the social knowledge (such as that of diverse voices within local communities, NGOs, policy makers) about nature. This suggests that advocacy models proposing disaster risk reduction strategies in any disaster need to be far more reflexive about the effects of their practices, and about the conscious or unconscious alliances they may be making with these different social actors.
Like Beck‟s risk society, where risks become known only after the effects of modernity have emerged – that is after the fact or the event81 – and resulting from critical reflexion on it, disaster risk reduction needs to be understood more as a critically reflexive process rather than as one that is dependent on technological or sociological quick-fix solutions (Beck, 1995a; 1995b). What is more, they must attend to Latour (2004a) and indeed the local and subaltern voice from the researched village which calls for a perspective on disasters that is built from an association of humans and non-humans and committed to building ethical futures. Thus neither a social engineering, nor a technological engineering of nature provides a full answer to disasters: although both need to be assessed critically: as a political ecology or social vulnerability approach suggests. The answers are rather to be sought through a reflexive search, within oneself and within societies of people, which reflexively interrogates the normative self-society-nature relationship and its contested nature, and treats disaster risk reduction as a non-linear process to be achieved, rather than as a pre-determined social or technocratic strategy.
81 For example: pollution and its awareness was only made possible after the pollution took effect as a result
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Chapter 7
Disasters, Social Change and Politics for Rights
7.1 Introduction
The last chapter has argued that disaster risk reduction be treated as a non-linear complex process committed to building ethical futures. This chapter further seeks to understand how these ethical futures can be built by treating disasters as an opportunity for change and to mobilise social change through the agency of subaltern groups or a politics for rights.
This chapter starts by tracing the limits of the local coping strategies to disasters and local constructions of entitlements informed through the moral economy such as notions of bhav-vyavhar. Although important, such strategies are not enough to cope with full impacts of the disasters at local levels. Lack of labour work in the agricultural fields after disasters, survival necessities and the need to meet other social obligations such as marriage, push people into undertaking migration to cities or urban areas. The effects of this migration on social relations in their native villages, as well as that of the city they migrate to, and the identity questions faced by the migrants are traced in this chapter.
The Indian constitution upholds the right to caste and gender equality. By tracing the parameters through which social identities are formed and asserted in the context of disaster, this chapter analyses the production of these rights in the social terrain, beyond the limits of governmentality, and through subaltern politics for the assertion of these equality rights. In particular, this chapter studies the assertion or non-assertion of these equality rights as an indicator of the dynamics of social change processes given the historical relation of dominance and subordination based on castes and gender in India.