Pathways To Community Recovery Following The 2004 Tsunami In Tamil Nadu, India

In recent years the recovery efforts following major disasters, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina and the 2010 Haiti earthquake, have highlighted the need for a better understanding of what factors lead to the recovery of communities. Previous studies have clearly demonstrated that there is wide variation in how well different communities recover after a disaster, with some achieving greater resilience while others become more vulnerable. And, while there have been increasing numbers of individual and small-n case studies of disaster recovery in recent years, there have been few broad comparative studies that link post-disaster actions and pre-disaster measures of resilience and vulnerability to long-term recovery outcomes. This paper answers the question “why do communities recover differently from the same disaster?” using a novel method, fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), to determine what combinations of pre-disaster factors and recovery strategies led to successful post-tsunami community recovery in Tamil Nadu, India. Data was collected on infrastructural and social recovery outcomes for each community in addition to suspected conditions that affect recovery through observations, interviews and secondary sources in 15 villages. Results found multiple pathways to the different recovery outcomes for these villages. In particular, pretsunami factors of social vulnerability and access to government resources were important, as were the recovery agency embeddedness, coordination and oversight for both infrastructural and social recovery. INTRODUCTION The number of reported natural disasters and damage caused by natural disasters is on the rise (EMDAT 2009), generating concern and interest in how to help communities prepare for and recover from a natural disaster. Disasters in developing communities are a particular concern because disaster losses and the required recovery efforts may delay investments that aim to reduce poverty and increase access to education and safe housing (Pelling et al. 2004). This research focuses on one particular disaster, the Indian Ocean tsunami, which occurred on Sunday, 26 December 2004 after an earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale struck the northern coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. The resulting tsunami affected many countries including Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, the Maldives, Somalia, and Myanmar. We studied communities in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, which accounted for the majority of deaths and displacements in India (Arya et al. 2006). From this and other disasters, it is clear that communities recover at different rates and to different levels following disasters, with some achieving greater resilience while others become more vulnerable (Bates and Peacock 1989; Finch et al. 2010). However, there is less understanding of why this occurs in other words, why communities recover differently from the same disaster. While the immediate phase of disaster response is well-studied, strategies for long-term recovery have not been studied extensively (Rubin 2009), and a comprehensive theory of how recovery occurs has not yet been formed (Smith and Wenger 2006). In order to build