 My name is Svader Molland and I'm a lecturer in anthropology and development studies here at the ANU and I'm joined with my colleague John McCarthy to discuss some of his recent research in Acha in the context of humanitarian assistance from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and Consider some of the impacts that had in the long run 10 years after John can you just talk a little bit about some of the research you've done? In Acha? Well, I lived in on the west coast of Acha for about a year during the late 1990s when I was doing my PhD research and after this time, of course, we had the guerrilla War in Acha between the Acha in Madaka the Acha freedom movement and the Indonesian government so I didn't go back for several years and then of course we had the tsunami and I missed the tsunami intervention. I volunteered with various agencies as well a few people I guess in Australia who'd lived on the west coast of Acha, but nobody took up my offer to go as a volunteer So I always said to all all the people that I met who were working in Acha in the post tsunami period that I would go Back there after that all gone back home and that's what I did So I went back about eight years after tsunami to to look at what had been the impact of all these extensive development projects along the west coast which I lived in about over 10 years previously That's rather interesting. So in some ways, it's like you have done an archaeology of humanitarian assistance in a way you've gone back nearly a decade after after the Indian Ocean tsunami Yes, it was quite on the one side quite confronting to go back to these communities. The communities I went back to visit weren't the ones that I'd lived in previously because through some Some twist of fate the part of the coast that I lived on had missed the tsunami but further along You know an almost number of people they had been killed So it was really sad to go visit these communities But at the same time it was kind of fascinating because you walk along the village road And you would see an abandoned building that had been constructed during the tsunami period or you'd see a sign Outside of building saying what it was for but often it was was no longer being used or people would tell you about What happened at a particular time about some cooperative that once existed there And of course now you could just see the sign saying that there was a cooperative there so And also there were a lot of buildings that had been destroyed in the tsunami that were Kind of sitting there like Roman ruins or across the landscape, which was quite confronting to see So when you went back about 80 years after the Indian Ocean tsunami, so as you just said A lot of sort of material differences if you like and Sort of ruins if you like of of previous social organization and so forth um Can you say a little bit more about or I suppose one thing that i'm i'm curious about is is um You know you had all this enormous humanitarian effort You know just after in the immediate aftermath of the The the tsunami Going back 80 years after What did you find what what did that humanitarian assistance look like and also Also if you can talk a little bit about the type of humanitarian assistance that was given in those communities In the aftermath of the tsunami um Well, it's a huge topic. There's a whole library of papers and books written about it, but because The post tsunami intervention in archa is arguably one of the biggest state interventions in history They spent about 6.7 billion billion dollars on this intervention So there were all sorts of things that they did and I must say some of the interventions were very successful in the sense that they did a lot of um Interventions immediately after tsunami which were incredibly successful in terms of stabilizing people's food security Intervening medically that that stages of the intervention was incredibly successful And they did a lot of very good things in terms of rebuilding roads beautiful roads along the west coast of archa Rebuilding rice paddies in some areas have been very well done beautiful bridges Wonderful clinics. I could show you photos of all these beautiful buildings. So on that level in terms of building assets It was incredibly successful Of course because I had so much money to spend and they had a short window to spend it in because If you remember back at that time a lot of agencies were being criticized for not spending their money So they had to spend their money as quickly as possible So as you walked around the village, you would come across What one world bank guy said to me were white elephants These things that had been built in incredible rush because somebody had said the village needed it and for instance just to give you an example in one of the villages I visited there was kind of a A health clinic and I think there was only someone from the Health the district health service coming once a month. So that must the time the building was empty There was another building built for the women's association in the village Which was basically used as a storehouse. It was a beautiful building So you meet all these sorts of and also you would find these ghost villages where they rebuilt a whole village But in the wrong place they built it sort of where people didn't want to live And so nobody would move into it. So they had to rebuild the village somewhere else And so you you'd find this Whole place with 30 or 40 houses were completely In ruins because they'd they'd been built but never occupied and someone had gone in there and trashed them And so all kinds of different things across the landscape So obviously there must have been a lot of challenges with with that Uh, on the one hand, you have that immediate response, right? But then you get that more long-term sort of, you know post tsunami Reconstruction phase, etc. And and you already pointed out a few problems with that Uh, obviously, you know, the pressure to spend money quick The fact that a lot of agencies come in at the same time and as you say Short window of opportunity to to deliver aid They are obvious challenges and perhaps help to explain some of the problems to some extent, but Could you say a little bit more about, uh, you know, what were some of the reasons for why some of these Interventions perhaps in the more long term Had challenges or or perhaps even failed Okay, um, of course You know not to rubbish people's efforts a lot of people went in there with a great deal of goodwill and tried to do the right thing and There was you know, like I said, there were quite a degree of success particularly around Giving people assets people who lost everything they gave them assets. They gave them They rebuilt their houses. They gave them cattle They if people had a a warung a kind of a little village shop they would give them capital to reopen their shop and um Some people when I came back out years later still had these assets and we're continuing to to live off them So on that level it was very successful. What they were less successful They were much less successful in helping people rebuild their livelihoods now the reasons for this are quite complex And people told me in the post tsunami period if you were a villager Everyone wanted to do participatory development So what would happen was FAO or oxfam or save the children would come into the village and would try and do participation So they would get people to come along and come to a community meeting So because you remember there's 180 NGOs trying to spend 6.7 billion dollars Of course, not all of this is NGO money, but this was a total amount of money. So There was just a flood of NGOs. Um people in archie Excuse me talked about three tsunamis the actual tsunami When the water hit the coast then the aid tsunami when there's 6.7 billion dollars start of coming And then the third tsunami was when the money all left because they had a window to spend all this money So during the period when the aid tsunami was flowing Someone in the village could today they would get paid to go to the oxfam participatory rule development project And sit around discussing what the village needed and tomorrow they might go to the FAO one the day after It might be the Red Cross. So villagers could earn a living just going to all these community participation meetings Which meant that there was no incentive for them to go back into their ice paddy or To start fishing again. They could just live off the aid money And this is what many of them did for up to seven six Five six seven years they just lived off for several years participating in all these different projects and they also got um money for work So a lot of people would get their money for work, but and this idea was that they would then go back to their rice paddy and They get paid an income to actually rebuild their ice paddy or rebuild their livelihood But you've got to remember that in many of these villages up to 50 percent of people had died even more in some villages. So you might have the only person left in a household might be The the male the male head of the household So these men these people were very traumatized. So they were also very depressed as you would imagine So in many cases they didn't really consider Rebuilding their livelihoods for several years until they remarried or somehow reconstituted their Their livelihoods and it was also very sad if you went around the village You would meet people were obviously so traumatized that they never really recovered from the tsunami So it's quite confronting to actually go into those sorts of landscapes Um, so people if you ask villages about what happened Um, now I should say one key point here is we did a Survey to try and work out what the level of vulnerability was and we class. We used this FAO classification of food security so this is a It's the kind of survey you do during the what indonesians call the paccek click the hunger season in a rice producing area There was usually a critical time But just before the harvest when the product from the last harvest have run out And they still haven't harvested the next harvest. So it's a period when they ran out of rice Now if they've got good livelihoods They they've got other forms of income which will cover this period What we found in the two villages where we up to do this survey it was incredibly Time-consuming to do this kind of survey. We found that up to 50 percent of villages had various degrees of Vulnerability by which I mean there was I think about 10 percent of villages that were worried about running out of food but then there was probably about Between 30 or 40 percent of villages that were cutting back on food to some degree people weren't starving But they were altering what they would eat. So you know actually what people typically eat is they put for instance like a family might put four cups of rice into the rice book Into the Saucepan each day to cook for the household But say during this hunger season they might cut down to two Cups of rice or instead of usually along the coast here. They would eat Rice and they would eat fish and they would eat vegetables. So instead of having fish every day They might only be having fish once or twice a week. So what we found there was about 30 or 40 percent of households were at that level of vulnerability They were cutting back on their food during the hunger season because their livelihoods hadn't really been reconstructed This is despite 6.7 billion dollars of aid being spent So this is this is a the big question. How could we have such an intervention? With such goodwill and such A good intention to what the aid agencies said was to build back better And then we have this level of vulnerability existing in these villages Seems to me to be a key sort of paradox and and I suppose you can see this in all the types of humanitarian context The the build back better slogan that was also something that was used in in Haiti as well, for example, right and I don't want to start talking about Haiti right now, but you know, there are similar type of challenges in different contexts Just back to you mentioned this idea of participation and So one thing that You talk about in one of your papers on this, which I thought was really really interesting Is this idea of social capital? I mean social capital has been written about extensively both in academic literature but also in aid aid literature as well But what is interesting in this case, I think is that you you do look at this in the context of The long-term aftermath of a humanitarian intervention essentially Can you say a little bit more about Social capital in this particular context and why it's important? okay, so In lay terms the idea of social capital is that the social networks and relationships that we have in a particular place are the key to economic development in that place. So the idea here is that If R.J. is going to redevelop These social relationships and social networks are the key to it redeveloping now the world bank did a survey of archie where they They concluded that archie had very high levels of social capital So the idea was and this is an idea found across the development literature To build back better The archie should be in the key decision-making role. So the idea was that Decisions about where things should be rebuilt or how they should be rebuilt would be put to the community So what would happen was in these community development processes the community would be invited to a meeting and they'd be engaged in decision-making about You know where things should be rebuilt or how the money should be spent or what was the most immediate need now the problem was that In archie we'd had a war for For several years between a a guerrilla movement that was in the hills and the and the government the military and so villagers had been stuck in the middle between these two warring parties really and so what had happened was During this period the economy had really fallen apart at the village level And also to a large degree trust had broken down between villagers because They were all afraid of becoming a victim from either side and so they they didn't know who they could trust And the other thing that happened was that because When the development agencies came into their area they all tried to contact The local leaders and of course the local leaders had their own networks Um and some if you are a local leader in a village you would have all the people in the village You're close to and then there would be some people that you're less close to or you didn't really trust So when oxfam came to talk to you for instance, you would tend to mobilize your networks and you would try and get aid to work in a way that Well could prove to oxfam that you are a good leader, but it would also Lead to good outcomes for all your networks. So what happened was this created a lot of jealousy in the village So if i'm not part of your network and I don't get access to all this aid I start hating you and so then when you call a village meeting I won't come along or I feel just bitter and twisted about it. And so this is what tended to happen Through these um these kind of processes often if they weren't done very skillfully They would split the community and also maybe you were close with oxfam But I was close with save the children and somebody else was close with the red cross So each of the different agencies might be competing for the same person or different people might be jockeying for position Because if you get access you had this kind of mediating role with the agency you got opportunity to help people You had opportunity to enhance your status and perhaps you might also get some opportunities yourself for a good livelihood for several years So we had this kind of process and one well bank guy that I spoke to during the course of the research said that This actually this kind of process actually destroyed collective action in the religion wrecked social capital So in indonesians have this tradition of what they call got on royal Where they for instance would all come together to clean the mosque or to fix up village facilities Now when I went back there What I found was that they were hardly was hardly working at all anymore after the tsunami Because also people got used to the fact that You should be paid to do things so what happened was That when these development agencies tried to use social capital to rebuild Um, sometimes they came along with their participatory manual and said well, we should have accountability transparency We should set up new forms of institutions that are working in a sort of modern way And so they would set up new structures And then there was this whole phenomena of if you go up on the web You'll see all these pictures of all these aid projects being handed over to the archonies and there'll be a Usually somebody cutting a ribbon or doing something like that and there'll be all these smiling people there So I had a number of informants say oh, yes, the project went really well until it was surrendered to us And then after that we no longer Took part in it. We just went back to our own networks. So you find all these Sign posts around the village about different Cooperatives or different sort of aid projects and if you go behind there There's actually nothing operating there anymore because after the project ended um Nothing continued people went back to their existing networks to their existing livelihoods now the exception where we found in the two sub districts we were in and I think You know, there would have been scores of projects in those two sub districts. We found about Seven five to seven. I can't remember exactly now. It's a couple years ago. So I was doing this But it was a probably half a dozen successful projects So what what made these projects successful? Why were they able to mobilize social capital? So there's a number of key things factors here One of the things is that they didn't try to set up new structures they tried to fit into the local context and there was a element of serendipity here because they happened by chance to come across village leaders who had a great sense of authority but also um Respect in the village So these people were able to mobilize their authority to make people accountable and transparent for their activities I can elaborate a bit on that if you're interested. Yeah, no, definitely. So, I mean, that's One of the interesting things about that. I think is is that it it does I suppose it poses some practical challenges from the point of view of aid organizations How do you program for that sort of thing when serendipity is sort of, you know, part of what makes something work But it seems to me to also in a more maybe conceptual way also to be interesting too in the sense that Again, if you if you try to think about something like social capital as as an analytic device to understand social relations and social practices um It becomes somewhat, um, you know, it raises some interesting questions about how, you know, what does that mean, right? So, yeah, so so perhaps a question and would be um Given that you have some, you know, success if you like Depending on particular community leaders and again back to this point about social capital uh, what you also seem to be touching on here is that we are actually dealing with success being contingent on hierarchical relations and You know, in many ways social capital is sort of this idea of horizontal relations in some respects or somehow this idea that we have You know networks have somehow or social networks have some sort of Um, there's a solidarity function if you like in that somehow So, um, and again if you want to talk about participation um, you know Again, how do you reconcile that with the fact that you need to target maybe community leaders? Uh, that can actually exercise authority in order to have successful outcomes So, um, so yeah, if you can maybe comment on that a little bit I mean to me it seems to to pose a larger question Both in terms of what can aid Programs then do given those insights At the same time, what can we learn in terms of you know, what are the broader implications of social capital? Okay. Well, that's a quite interesting point. Um I think the the famous book by putnam he talks about It compares northern italy with with southern italy and southern italy has got what he describes as more dysfunctional forms of social capital because You might remember south southern italy is where the mafia operates. So we've got very Powerful forces of work there Vertically, there's some very powerful sort of patrons and horizontally There's kind of networks of replicosity between people But we don't get the kind of associations which he saw to the as a key to development in In northern italy now if you look at arch a what what you find there is that It's similar in that way. We've got usually in the village. We've got 30 or 40 or even 50 percent of villages are sharecroppers, which means they are incredibly dependent on their landlords so all we have is a very dependent sort of social arrangement where Um a large number of people in the village are very much dependent on the key leaders in that village for access to resources for borrowing money for Access to rice land these sorts of things. So they can't afford to offend these people At the same time people are also very much dependent on their neighbors or their Their family. So they've got these kind of very tight horizontal networks But we don't find the kind of associations that putnam talked about in in northern italy. So what happens then is that When a development agency comes in they're really going to be working with these key people in the village which Although we might talk about these participatory processes It's very hard for villages to hold these village leaders accountable because they're also very dependent dependent on them in these Kind of patron client contexts. So that that's where it's very hard for it to work I mean the other that's not saying that if you get a good patron It can work. So there's a tension there. You do a participatory process you can be captured by These local big men if you want to call them or big women Um, but the other hand if you get a good patron, you can have a very successful project So this is a kind of the the paradox of the social capital kind of Framing of it. But the other thing that some of the crit critiques of social capital ideas and participatory Approaches or what they call now Community-driven development. This is the idea that community should drive development. One of the critiques of it is that We're making communities responsible for their own development that we're saying You've got capacities within your community and you should be up to drive the whole process Whereas in underdeveloped communities that's going to be a problem and when we've had a tsunami and a civil war in an area A lot of villages aren't In this position to become what we might call participatory subjects They're not able to become the model participants of the community driven development sorts Tends to assume because well, they're traumatized. They've lost half their family Um, they're just interested in trying to to get by until they're in a better State of mind. So this is the reason I remember one villager saying to me Oh, I actually met a whole lot of villagers in a coffee shop one one night and we had a long chat and they said They weren't bitter about how it all worked out. They didn't blame the aid agencies They said, well, you know, we were so traumatized or so upset by what happened to us in the tsunami that was only about after about eight years That we started thinking about the future By eight years all the aid agencies had pulled out and they'd spent This uh, what I say 6.8 billion dollars and it was too late So this was a it was a kind of wistfulness Amongst all of these people which who are now food insecure many of them because um, the livelihoods hadn't been repaid So what are the implications for aid agencies? There's probably a couple of things here. I think one of the things is that This window this idea of spending money quickly is really problematic. Yes. So the aid agencies are really, um They're accountable to their donors back home and people in Australia want to see the money disperse quickly after a disaster This is actually a problem. So the aid agencies aren't accountable locally So there's incentives for them to spend their money as quickly as possible But this is really a problem And the second thing is if they trip over each other and don't make wise decisions Nobody in the donating the donating community back here in Australia is going to know, are they? So that's right. Yes. So they produce these very glossy reports Saying, you know, um, how successful their their activities were. I'm not blaming them. It's a very hard Field of development that they're intervening in Um, but it really needs to be rethought. The other thing is that I remember meeting, um, one Arjeni's leader there who was Quite bitter about he said look all the NGOs came in they bypassed the government So they spent all their money through this community driven development, but they didn't Do much to rebuild the state which is probably a bit unfair because I know a lot of donors like Osaid now defed did spend a lot of money trying to help the Indonesian government. But that's right To a large degree, he did have a valid point that they rushed in they Um They tried to get past the Indonesian government So in the long term after everybody's gone home who is left The community and the government and maybe some NGOs but NGOs don't have sustainable funding So most of the NGOs that had emerged in the post tsunami period were no longer operating when I was there so the question is over the longer term helping the state to develop its capacity to develop these areas and um Creating more accountability and transparency and greater capacity in the state is really critical So I think we can go too far with the social capital community driven development approach It doesn't mean we should throw it away altogether because clearly we need to Engage with local communities and get them involved in making decisions, but we can't go too far with that Thank you very much john. Uh, very fascinating Um discussion about your your research in in archer. Thank you Um, and of course the the paper's available if anybody's interested in in pursuing it Yes, definitely level of course go into some of these These issues in more detail including this idea of social capital in a humanitarian post or post humanitarian context If you like and I also go through the six or seven projects that actually succeeded So I don't want to be too negative about all this There was a large degree of success, but also a very large degree of of Um Not so successful outcomes. Yes. Okay. Thank you. Thank you