Disaster recovery and structural inequalities: A case study of community assertion for justice

This paper explores the contradictions presented by formal interventions into communities. Rationalized to be irreplaceable, these interventions are event centric and differ considerably from the community's experience of disaster risk and recovery within the everyday context, especially marginalized ones that are presumed to lack capacity. Thus, community engagement with multiple formal institutions that often fail to address recovery needs of the most marginalized, is inevitable. This study draws from the work of scholars who recognize the limits of procedural justice and push for distributive justice, especially by focusing on grassroots processes using the lens of the politics of neo-liberalism and ontology of possibilities. Using a multi-sited instrumental case study—in Vistapit Mukti Vahini and Thayillamapproach—the paper explores community's lived experiences, factors contributing to the persistence of structural inequality and injustice, and the alternate conception of justice and their assertions, in the disaster recovery context.

The study indicates that disaster creates maximum risk and causalities in the global south, and hence, state institutions are active in governing the disaster risks. In the global south, the vulnerable poor and marginalized groups are more exposed to disaster and in this critical context bureaucracy often takes control of the disaster recovery process too. Thus, like development projects, disaster recovery is also being governed by state institutions through bureaucratic regulations and control. Extending the same power on disaster recovery is being considered as ‘normal’, however such normal interventions often do not address the recovery needs of the most marginalized and triggers movements like the Vistapit Mukti Vahini and Thayillam. Structurally excluded communities perceive recovery as an instrument to overcome the institutional and political barriers on socio-economic mobility. As theoretical perspectives on justice are primarily pre-occupied with procedural justice, especially in the context of disasters, the researchers argue that theorizing on structural inequality and injustices in disaster recovery would benefit from the in depth focus on social relations and processes as they manifest in everyday lives of the most marginalized communities at risk.