Presentation short abstract

This study examines how development-driven deforestation and shrimp aquaculture intensified vulnerability to Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar’s delta. It shows how women-led, multispecies regeneration, rooted in river and care, offered alternatives to colonial post-disaster governance and technocratic aid.

Presentation long abstract

Cyclone Nargis struck Myanmar’s Ayeyarwady Delta in May 2008 with catastrophic force, killing an estimated 138,000 people and displacing millions. Decades of export-oriented shrimp aquaculture had accelerated deforestation, mangrove clearance, habitat fragmentation, and water pollution, eroding ecological buffers that historically mitigated storm surges, supported fisheries, and stabilised riverine life (FAO, 2005; EJF, 2004).

Based on fieldwork in two severely affected riverside communities in Dedaye and Myaungmya townships, this study examines how recovery unfolded along competing trajectories: externalised humanitarian intervention and grassroots regeneration. Post-disaster assistance, while framed through humanitarian rationales, frequently operated through technocratic and spatially re-ordering logic, resettlement schemes, standardised housing, and infrastructure placement, that reproduced colonial modes of governance by displacing local lifeworlds and consolidating state authority over land and populations.

Against this, the paper documents a community-led regeneration process led by women’s collectives that remained less dependent on externally delivered goods and services. Women mobilised river knowledge, cultural practices, and multispecies care to reconstruct livelihoods through reciprocal relations with land, water, and non-human life.

Conceptually, the paper proposes forces of regeneration as an analytical framework to capture how communities recover not merely through reconstruction but by re-making socio-ecological relations in the aftermath of destruction. It shows how women’s labour, river ecologies, and multispecies relations function as sites of political agency, care, and renewal. This study argues regeneration as relational, situated, and feminist, and reframes resilience as a political-ecological process grounded in land-river-based ethics and more-than-human alliances, therefore, contributing to the political ecology of disasters.