Paper short abstract:

Drawing on field work from communities in post-disaster Tohoku, the paper discusses the "good practice" of Community-Based Disaster Recovery and its effectiveness in the Japanese context

Paper long abstract:

The aim of the research is to contribute to a growing critical literature on dominant disaster recovery and risk management approaches that primarily focus on emergency management, thus separating the recovery process from the underlying drivers of risks and vulnerabilities that stem from the everyday social, political and economic context. Drawing on the data from Tohoku, the research concludes that the current "good practice" of Community-Based Disaster Recovery has done little to address issues of power and community agency and is having a 'pausing' effect on communities. The research hypothesises that this can have consequences for the long-term viability of recovery efforts, and instead argues that more sustainable forms of recovery and disaster risk management could be achieved by utilising community development practices that would embed these processes into the dwelled experience and everyday setting of affected communities. The research explores the use of disaster anthropology to open new avenues for both macro- and micro-level analyses to take place inside the social, economic and political context, and how to address them in a democratic way that enables agency, participation, and action on multiple levels.

Past research indicates that communities that are engaged and have clear plans for the future are resilient in the face of disasters, and quicker at bouncing back. Applying this idea to the recovery context, the research presents a methodology and preliminary results from an on-going ethnographic study on social construction of the post-disaster future conducted in Miyagi in 2015 and 2016. It explores the visions of individual grassroots actors for the future of their communities, roles of various actors within the process, and perceptions on whether current recovery is making these visions a reality. The paper finds that rather than making comparative analyses between pre- and post-disaster community conditions, by studying people's constructions of alternative and ideal hypothetical futures, we can gain a more accurate understanding of how transformed post-disaster social, political and economic structures and governance are affecting sustainability of recovery, and perceptions of personal and community agency.