Relief and livelihood recovery as entry-point for comprehensive CBDRM addressing root causes of people’s vulnerability

5.3. Relief and livelihood recovery as entry-point for comprehensive CBDRM addressing root causes of people’s vulnerability

This approach to CBDRM views ‘disasters’ as a product embedded in a societal history that produced patterns of vulnerability to which political (sub)systems must respond. Disasters are an opportunity for social and institutional change. It aims to change people’s mind-sets, both communities and NGO staff, towards a consciousness that DRM is not only the responsibility of governments, scientists and the military, but that local people and civil society have a voice too in reducing disaster risk. However, the government will not change its DRM practice unless people themselves start to engage with government to demand safety and protection against disaster impact, backed-up by the 2007 DM law.

Relief and/or livelihood recovery activities are used to build contact and trust between NGO field staff village authorities and various groups in the community. As we observed in the field, relief and livelihood concerns match with people’s urgent felt needs after a disaster hit their locality. People’s motivation to engage with an outside NGO/CSO will be present and for NGO/CSO it is a way to understand the local context, particularly people’s differing risk perspectives and problems.

Figure 5.3 Comprehensive CBDRM addressing root causes of people’s vulnerability

Through reflective discussions with different social groups 22 , CBOs, village authorities separately, an inclusive risk assessment and map will be composed that will serve as an instrument for dialogues between different groups within the village, between CBOs and village authorities, and beyond

the community 23 . These dialogues serves to identify and prioritize DRM action points that address practical livelihood needs of people, and those that address current institutional arrangements that rather produce than reduce people’s vulnerability causing insecure livelihoods. This combination is important because people expect to see some immediate gains from their efforts, while networking, lobby and negotiation with government agencies may take a long time and don’t immediately result in tangible outcomes. These lobby activities require the involvement of multi-level institutions and authority. The case in Pati district, Central Java shows how relationships between a district level CBO-CSO-NGO network and the district government around flood mitigation changed during a period of 3 years from opposi tional towards agonic relationships, meaning that both parties view each other as a legitimate actor in the DRM dialogue space. They don’t share the same view on disaster risk reduction, but they realize they need to engage with one another to address the floods;

22 ‘Social groups ‘refer to people who share a structural position in society, and their options to cope with disasters are related to that position. We refer to landless day labourers, migrants, plantation workers or other groups who are not organized in the traditional CBOs, and remain invisible for outside aid agencies..

the district government needed to secure resources to start river normalization which they found in Jakarta pushed by the CBO-CSO-NGO network, while this network is responsible for informing local communities about the consequences of river normalization, particularly those residents that need

to be re-allocated 24 . This particular risk problem became an entry-point for civil society to engage more constructively with government and particularly with the district BPBD towards institutional development.