Latest / But We Had A Plan | A Disaster Nomad Podcast / Ep 01: Resilience has lost its meaning
Transcript
- Jess: if you ask 10 disaster management professionals to define resilience for you, you'll probably get 12 different answers. And so that's where we are going to start today. Episode one, not with a crisis, not with a case study, but with a question that I think we don't ask enough in this field. What does resilience actually mean? And are we building it or are we just talking about it? I'm Jess van Schalkwyk. And welcome to our first episode. Before we get into the meat of today's episode, a good place to start would probably be introducing myself and telling you a little bit about why I'm so passionate about this. So, my name is Jess. I am a registered professional disaster manager who is based in South Africa, and I am the managing director of Disaster Nomad. And we're a consultancy who focuses on the entire disaster continuum, meaning everything from before a disaster happens, making sure that there is Planning and preparedness that goes into that to then supporting when disasters do happen and making sure that people are able to recover a lot faster. So I studied disaster relief management through NHL Stenden South Africa and then went on to complete my master's in disaster management and resilience at Coventry University. I've had the immense privilege of working with a number of immediate response organizations, government departments. And community organizations. And that is where I've really probably learned the most is that time in the field during responses and learning from the communities and the people who are so used to living these incidents and just understanding better what it takes to actually come out of the other side of a disaster event so much stronger and with so much more under the belt for the next time something happens. Over the last decade, I've been a part of 24 immediate response and longer-term recovery programs globally, and that has been a wide range of disasters. Everything from earthquakes to hurricanes, fires, floods. It has been a truly mixed bag. And I've been able to work in some really beautiful countries and learn the most incredible things From the communities that we've been able to work alongside. Today, through Disaster Nomad, I work with organizations like UNICEF, Save the Children, Ibex Ideas, and Baotree, All Hands and Hearts, as well as dipping into the corporate sector and working with tourism operators, with mines who have a close tie to communities and a variety of other entities Who ordinarily wouldn't consider disaster management to be a part of their everyday. And so across sectors and borders and the entire disaster continuum, we are able to better support individuals, organizations, communities in developing resilience. And across all of that work and all those contexts, there is this one theme that keeps on coming up. And it's one concept that everyone agrees matters, but the sector is still struggling to embed in a meaningful and measurable and sustainable way. And that is resilience. And that's really why this podcast exists. It is to have a space where the conversation that this field needs with people who are actually already doing the work on the ground and the researchers who are Pushing the thinking forward, the policymakers who are translating these ideas into funded action and communities who are at the center of all of it can have a place to talk about it. We're going to be covering things like careers, specific technical topics, lessons from the field, and emerging approaches and the human side of working in one of the most demanding sectors on earth. And so today I thought why don't we start at the beginning? I think it's important to be honest about something first. Resilience has become one of those words that gets used so often in so many different contexts and by so many different actors that it's started to lose its edge. It's in every strategy document and funding proposal and post-disaster evaluation. And that's because donors love it, governments love it, and Ultimately, the humanitarian sector loves it. And yet, when you actually start looking past the language, you often find that what people mean by resilience is actually quite narrow. There is this bounce back capacity or getting back to normal as quickly as possible after a shock. And I want to challenge that because I think bounce back is only part of the story. And in a lot of cases, it might actually be the wrong goal. If a community was already vulnerable before a disaster, if the systems that failed were already failing, and if the inequalities that were exposed were already present, then bouncing back to a baseline isn't resilience. All we are doing is resetting those conditions for the next disaster. And so true resilience when I think about it and as I understand it. and I think as research is increasingly supporting, it's not just about absorbing those shocks, but it's rather about the capacity to adapt and to learn and transform. And to come through something Different, not just intact, but that there is this very clear distinction of what came before and now what comes after. And that distinction matters enormously for how we do our work within this sector. After the years that I've spent in the field, and there are many more years to come, and my definitions on these things may change and grow as we learn and understand things more. But I've come to think about resilience across three distinct dimensions that all have to work together. And you cannot have one without the other if you want to talk about comprehensive disaster resilience. The first of those is structural resilience. And this is, I think, what most people think of first. We're talking about physical infrastructure, early warning systems, contingency plans, stockpiling, your evacuation routes. It's all those things that they're probably the first thing that people think of when you talk about disaster management and resilience. And all of these things matter. They absolutely matter. That they are also the part of resilience that is often poorly maintained and they are disconnected from the communities they're supposed to serve. The second on the list is social resilience. And the way that I like to think of this is almost like connective tissue. It's the relationships and the trust and the community networks. it's the informal systems of mutual support that activate before any official response arrives. And I've seen communities with almost no formal infrastructure recover faster than well resourced ones. And that is all because the social fabric was so strong. People knew each other and they trusted each other. And so what that meant is that they showed up for each other. And a prime example of this was during a response that we did in Peru, where the community was severely under-resourced. And Yet they came through that that event so strong and I think so much faster than what I've seen areas who have got way better resources because the community made the time to get to know each other. And every night they all came together at a central community hub and they ate together and they danced together and they understood each other so well. And it was That connection that was longstanding. It didn't just happen because of this event. This was part of their culture. That when disaster did arrive, they had that to fall back on. And it just really shone a light on the fact that social resilience is also one of the hardest things to build artificially. And it's also very easy to. accidentally destroy it through our top-down response approaches if we bypass local community structures. The third piece that I think of when I talk about resilience is adaptive resilience. And I think this is the one that we probably talk about the least, but the one that I find the most interesting. And it's about the capacity of a system, so a community or an organization or government to learn from experience, to challenge its own assumptions, and then to change course When evidence demands it. And in disaster management, this is where we have the most room to grow. Because our sector has a complicated relationship with learning. We produce these after-action reviews that often go unread. And we replicate the same models in different contexts without actually asking whether they fit. We measure our outputs instead of our outcomes. And sometimes we confuse the activity with impact. We think, you know, we've measured it and we've identified the lessons that we should have learned. But are we actually learning those lessons? And adaptive resilience forces us to ask harder questions. And I think it demands us to ask how we can Do more, and how can we be better as practitioners? So, what does all of this actually look like in practice? And I want to share something that I've observed across multiple contexts without naming specific places because I think this lesson is universal. I've seen communities where international aid arrived after a major disaster and essentially took over. Parallel systems were set up, local leaders were sidelined. And it wasn't done maliciously, but because the external response was faster and better resourced. And so needs were assessed and solutions were designed and then these projects were implemented and then the projects closed. And all those external actors left and the community was left With infrastructure that they didn't build and systems that they didn't own, and in some contexts, capacities they had before that allowed them to deal with the situations that they were already very familiar with, those the those capacities started to quietly atrophy during the response. And I just think compare that to responses where the community was at the center from day one, where local knowledge shaped the assessment and where local structures led coordination. It's where the external role was to support resource and amplify it rather than to replace it. And what's been so evident is that the outcomes are different. Maybe not always in the short term. sometimes the second approach is a little bit messier and slower and maybe more frustrating for us as external stakeholders. But in the long term, the capacity that remains is real when we involve communities, and that's because it belongs to the community and it gets used again when the next event comes, because there is going to be a next event. We can't We can't deny that and we can't try and fool ourselves into thinking it's not going to happen. But when we are building resilience alongside communities, we know that the next event that comes, the impacts, are likely not going to be as severe. And resilience is not something that we do to communities. It is rather something that we should be supporting. and building on and enhancing so that communities are able to become first responders and that they are able to become the disaster managers within their area. I believe that disaster management is a sector that is very genuinely at an inflection point right now. The scale of risks globally is increasing. Climate change is intensifying hazards and compressing the recovery windows between events. And we also see Urbanization concentrating vulnerability. There's also conflict that is intersecting with natural hazards in ways that compound both, and the global financial architecture for humanitarian response is under immense strain. But at the same time, what gives me a lot of hope is that the tools and the knowledge and The political will to do things differently, I don't believe has ever been more advanced. And things like the Sendai framework and the SDGs, loss and damage mechanisms, community-based disaster risk reduction, that intellectual architecture is such a valuable resource for more resilience-centered approaches. I believe our gap is actually implementation and it's also culture and that's the culture of the sector itself. And that is precisely why this podcast exists. I want this podcast to allow us to examine and dig deep and not criticize for the sake of criticism, because I love this field and I am so proud to work in it. But I want this podcast to become a place where we can ask questions and we can challenge ourselves and It can be a place of genuine curiosity about how we all become better and how we build systems that actually last and how we invest in resilience before a disaster happens instead of spending after something has occurred, and at that point we have little control over the long term impacts. And so in the coming episodes, I'm going to be speaking with people who are working on exactly these questions from a variety of different angles and different disciplines. And we'll talk with people like practitioners who ended up in this industry through unexpected career paths. We'll dig into community resilience that has been built from the ground up instead of being imposed from the outside. And sit with first responders who talk through specific events where decisions were had being made in real time, some of which worked, some of which definitely didn't work. And we'll also dig into things around the invisible toll of this industry, secondary trauma, moral injury, burnout, and what's required for this to become a sustainable. career for people. And what I want for this show is to have it become something that different voices and perspectives are able to have a space where we can question and we can discuss and we can grow together As an industry. And so if you're a disaster management professional, a researcher, community leader, or someone who is working in a sector that touches on disaster management, or maybe very unexpectedly so, and you're finding that there's an intersect between your sector and risk, your sector and risk reduction, your sector and disaster management. Or you're someone who's been through a disaster and you have something to say about it, we want to hear from you. I want to close today's episode by coming back to one of the questions that we opened with. What is the difference between a community that survives a disaster and one that comes out the other side stronger? I don't think it's a single thing. I don't think there is a formula. And I've seen resilience look very different in very different places. But if I had to point to one common thread that One thing that I've seen in the communities that have genuinely adapted and grow, it's this. They knew who they were before the disaster came. They had a sense of their own identity and their own strengths and ways of solving problems. And when disaster stripped everything else away, that still remained. And that was enough for them to begin. And that's the arc I want to trace with this podcast. Not just the mechanics of disaster management, but the deeper story of what it takes to build something that holds. And so thanks for joining us on this first episode, and we'll see you on the next one.