DOCUMENTOS JUSTIFICATIVOS II.– FORMACIÓN ACADÉMICA

This section considers the process of giving aid within a post-natural disaster context and how the former is interlocked in both local and international power relations and transactions; and finally the key issues such as how, by whom and for whose advantage this is encouraged and utilised.

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Climate change and poor communities in the global South generate income and livelihoods for thousands of local and foreign non-governmental organisations who are required to produce quick visible outcomes. Consequently, building and specifically post-disaster housing reconstruction justifies the Aid expenditure. As Boano et al. (2012: 5) argue ‘producing space and built form are inherently elite practices as they insist on who controls resources at different scales.’ I argue that aid is presented as ‘gift’ to the field actors as well as its beneficiaries by virtue of ‘the gift being more visible or accountable than the commodity, perhaps because of its continuing importance as a visible manifestation of one’s social relations’ (Dittmar, 1992: 98). In light of the anthropologist Marcel Mauss’ (1954) description of the ‘gift’, I contend that the process of giving aid in a post-disaster context is interlocked in both local and international power relations and transactions.

The purpose of development aid, as described by Dudley (1993: 141), is to help solve problems but yet less clear is whose problems are to be solved. Such aid, many scholars argue, is designed for the sole purpose of solving the economic problems of the wealthy industrialised countries (Hayter 1981, Linear 1985, Dudley 1993). Hence, one of the reasons that ‘gifts’ such as aid towards post-disaster reconstruction are made is to maintain a profitable ‘alliance’ or ‘association’ or perhaps business. This alliance is a force that binds the actors together and keeps them separate at the same time, divides their labour and constraints them to exchange (Mauss, 1954). There are inherent interests in giving aid as it is transformed into services that yield money. Hence this process of exchange challenges the status quo and existing power bases.

In his book ‘Planet of Slums’ (2006) Davis explains that the new wisdom of the late 1970s and early 1980s ordered that the state go into partnership with international donors and NGOs in order to become an ‘enabler’ of the poor as opposed to the top down structural reform of urban poverty undertaken by post-war social democracy in Europe and advocated by revolutionary-nationalist leaders of the 1950s (Davis, 2006:71). The tendency of the State going into partnerships with essentially international corporations is also observed, among other scholars, by Vandana Shiva (Ecowalkthetalk 2011), during an interview on the Traditional Knowledge, Biodiversity

and Sustainable Living. Shiva (ibid.) explains that ‘Society used to have three pillars:

the Government/State, business/corporations, and the Citizens. The corporations and State have merged to become a Corporate State. The Governments act in corporate

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interests, they have become of/by/for the corporations. Today the civil society is not just a counter veiling force to the government, it has to be a counter veiling force to corporations.’

It is important to explore the role that institutions are playing in either supporting or constraining vernacular building practices using traditional locally sourced materials from being adopted widely within post-disaster reconstruction initiatives. According to Guy & Marvin (2001: 137), ‘different field actors’ viewpoints and strategies, with often competing social, political and commercial interests, either resonate or dissonate with the visions inscribed in models of development.’ Therefore, this research reflects on the local power relations in order to understand the existing disparity between institutions, and what the implications are. Collaboration is not without its difficulties when two or more actors from different countries with different cultures, disciplines, timescales, priorities and institutional demands try to work together. Interdisciplinarity requires both a strong direction as well as the provision of a platform for dialogue to make explicit each partner's expectations of the collaboration sustained through the process. I contend that this platform for dialogue would aspire to act as King Arthur’s miraculous Round Table, as Mauss (1954: 81) states in ‘The Gift’, at which ‘no-one would be excluded and everyone would be at the same level.’ Anthony Oliver Smith argued, at the roundtable discussion titled ‘collaboration in interdisciplinary research projects’ organised by the University of Miami at the 112th American Association of Anthropologists (AAA) from November 20th to 24th 2013, that ‘there are no firsts among equals’ when actors from different disciplines try to frame the complex question or issues posed.

Hamdi (Lyons M. et al., 2010: xi) once argued that, ‘we need to shift our roles as experts and providers of everything to enablers. Recently he decided that this ‘either or’ distinction is neither helpful nor accurate. In order to be an effective enabler you have to be a prudent provider.’ According to Hamdi (ibid) there are four integrally related sets of responsibility vital to good practice: providing, enabling, adapting and sustaining (PEAS). He advocates that ‘we’ as both enablers and providers examine the context and circumstances thoroughly in order to decide how much of each and how they relate to each other. Schilderman (2010) observes that ‘it remains difficult for some decision makers to shift from a supply-driven ‘relief mode’ to a ‘reconstruction mode’ that ought to be more support driven and people centred.’ This fragmentation of the roles and

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expertise one may find positioned within reconstruction schemes often reflects in the way we design and build for uncertainty. I contend that there is no one blueprint for reconstruction that is uncompromising but rather many nuanced pathways which depend on the context we work in. It may transpire that the effectiveness of a scheme is contingent on the level of the practitioner’s or researcher’s familiarity with the context and field prior and during their involvement with the affected community. This is a point which I revisit on many occasions during this research.

The issues of ‘temporariness’ and ‘continuity’ have often come up both during my literature review as well as my own work experience on similar issues prior to this research, in juxtaposition to the normative perception of ‘permanence’ in the developed world. ‘Our’ perception of ‘permanence’ has been challenged over the past few years either due to the economic crisis in southern Europe or because of the natural disasters in European and western countries, i.e. the floods of 2014 in southwest England, the recent floods (May 2014) in Southeast Europe and the Balkans, etc. What does permanence mean to people from other parts of the world, which is in the Global South where the notion of permanence differs distinctly from what ‘we’ perceive as permanent in the global North. Disasters often place traditionally overlooked places on the spotlight and make then temporarily become the ‘spectacle.’ However, this lasts only for short period of time and these places are gradually forgotten whilst the NGOs continue working there. Schilderman’s argument is that this disparity and lack of continuity must be understood in terms of the political economy of post-disaster aid. It is the result of, among others, the transient ad hoc partnerships of actors who come together after a disaster; the involvement of long-term development agencies with little experience of the behaviour of markets and systems under the pressure of a disaster; the pressures of time and budget imposed by governments, donors, agencies. This thesis reflects on how the mitigation strategies could inform the reconstruction process so that the temporariness of the response process gradually becomes eliminated, and how ‘we’ could lessen the severity of potential disasters in relation to the practice of building houses.

Since mid 1990s the World Bank, UNDP and other aid institutions have increasingly bypassed governments to work directly with regional and neighbourhood NGOs (Davis, 2006:75). In 1976 the first UN-HABITAT Conference was held as well as the publication of Turner’s ‘Housing by People; Towards Autonomy in Building Environments’, ‘ this amalgam of anarchism and neoliberalism had become the new

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orthodoxy that formulated a radical departure from public housing favouring sites and services projects and in situ (slum) upgrading.’ ‘Helping the poor help themselves’ meant the momentous downsizing of entitlement implicit in the World Bank’s canonization of slum housing. Kavita Datt and Gareth Jones (Davis, 2006:74) argue that, ‘self-help is partly a myth as most self-help is actually constructed with the paid assistance of artisans, and for specialist tasks, skilled labour.’ Does praising the praxis of the poor or in other words helping the poor help themselves enable or constrain resilience? Or does it, as Jeremy Seabrook (1996) suggests, prepare for a withdrawal of state and local government intervention and support as ‘enablement’ and ‘good governance’ sidestep issues of ‘global inequality’ and ‘debt’ and cloak the absence of any macro strategy for alleviating (urban) poverty. Davis argues that praising the praxis of the poor became rather a smokescreen for reneging upon historic state commitments to relieve poverty and homelessness (2006: 72), and that ‘the effort of NGOs is constantly to divert people’s attention from the larger political evils of imperialism to merely local issues and so confuse people in differentiating enemies from friends’ (Davis, 2006: 78). In his book ‘In the Cities of the South: Scenes from a Developing World’ Jeremy Seabrook (Seabrook, 1996) states: ‘by demonstrating the ability, the

courage and the capacity for self-help of slum people, the way was prepared for a withdrawal of state and local government intervention and support.’ Shiva

(Ecowalkthetalk 2011) explains that ‘the civil society cannot take for granted that the

governments which they put in place, which in democracies are supposed to be of/by/for the people, will continue to act in people’s interests. For this reason only a vigilant, active civil society can defend the rights of citizens. We cannot take our freedom for granted anymore.’ This is where training the local community/masons makes a very

important shift. Additionally, the anthropologist Marcel Mauss brings out the importance of social justice and commitment to community and to others above self- advantage in order to make such an alliance’ successful, and states:

“In order to trade one must lay down their spear. When that is done they

can succeed in exchanging goods and ideas between individuals. It is only then that people can create, can satisfy their interests mutually and define them without recourse to arms. It is in this way that we will all learn how to oppose one another and how to give without sacrificing anyone’s rights or freedom.” (1954: 80)

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In order to begin to understand such a complex type of exchange or social phenomenon we may need to go farther than the mere ‘visible result’ of the process and break down, reconsider and redefine the social structure of giving aid. By looking at these social phenomena as ‘wholes’, as ‘systems in their entirety, may we be able to analyse facts of a more general nature, and our analysis may suggest the way to better administrative procedures for our societies’ (ibid: 69).