ABSTRACT
When a large disaster hits — like the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami — it receives international media coverage, aid is mobilised and aid agencies rush to respond. While survivors of smaller disasters might wish for such attention, there are often serious negative side-effects to these responses. As in development, the effectiveness of external funding depends on the quality and orientation of the intermediary (mostly local) institutions through which funding is channelled. Yet often, these institutions do not facilitate the participation of survivors in the process. Survivors may be sidelined with little influence over the responses that are chosen by more powerful groups, and little control over how the external funding is used or prioritised. For example, the disaster response in Banda Aceh after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami hit was referred to as the ‘second tsunami’ by the local communities there (Syukrizal et al. 2009). Among the many international agencies, each had their own budgets and priorities — and survivors found it very difficult to influence what was done and to get their priorities supported. While actors may employ the rhetoric of participation, for example in post-disaster housing reconstruction, the reality of this can range from local communities simply providing labour, to taking an active role in project management and planning (Davidson et al. 2007). Donor-driven recovery and reconstruction processes may focus on producing visible outputs, while the humanitarian cluster system seeks to divide problems into manageable pieces, but this is at the cost of addressing the bigger picture, the underlying vulnerabilities and the priorities of the disaster survivors (Levine et al. 2012; Schilderman and Lyons 2011; Schilderman and Lyons 2010; Lyons 2009).
