Building resilience: social capital in post-disaster recovery

Robert Putnam, who turned 'social capital' into a vogue social science term in the early 1990s, defined it as the intangible benefits of living in a society with well-established 'trust, norms and networks' (Putnam 1993: 167, cited on p. 29).This book argues that after a major disaster has occurred 'high levels of social capital -more than such commonly referenced factors as socioeconomic conditions, population density, amount of damage or aid -serve as the core engine of recovery ' (p.15, italics in original).Four case studies are used to make the point.One is Hurricane Katrina, which Purdue political scientist Daniel P. Aldrich experienced first-hand.Another is the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami as experienced in coastal communities in southern India.The other two are from Japan: the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and 1995 Kobe Earthquake.A recurring theme is how governmental recovery programs can make things worse if they neglect social capital-for example, disrupting social networks by randomly placing disaster victims in temporary housing.This comes up in the context of Kobe, south-eastern India and New Orleans (pp.156-157), and Aldrich also observes communities using lotteries to allocate temporary housing after the 2011 Tohoku tsunami (p.156).I have observed similar phenomena myself (cf.Gill, Steger and Slater 2013: 9) and would agree that such policies can be corrosive of community solidarity.However, I would add that these housing lotteries were not entirely random-in most cases, people had first applied for a particular housing project and the lottery was a way of rationing places when there were not enough to go round.The authorities did not just ignore the affective needs of the community, catchphrase of 'multicultural coexistence', there does appear to be some progress taking place, but at the end of the day, foreigners are still only seen as subjects of monitoring and exclusion' (p.85).In taking these words seriously, we should not be aiming for a temporary 'disaster utopia', but rather we should hope that discussions may lead to the realization of a kind of 'multiculturalization' that ensures a more sustainable form of mutual assistance.