Yaso Nadarajah

Sustainable Communities, Sustainable Development: Other Paths for Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea is going through a crisis: A concentration on conventional approaches to development, including an unsustainable reliance on mining, forestry, and foreign aid, has contributed to the countrys slow decline since independence in 1975. Sustainable Communities, Sustainable Development attempts to address problems and gaps in the literature on development and develop a new qualitative conception of community sustainability informed by substantial and innovative research in Papua New Guinea. In this context, sustainability is conceived in terms that include not just practices tied to economic development. It also informs questions of wellbeing and social integration, community-building, social support, and infrastructure renewal. In short, the concern with sustainability here entails undertaking an analysis of how communities are sustained through time, how they cohere and change, rather than being constrained within discourses and models of development. From another angle, this project presents an account of community sustainability detached from instrumental concerns with economic development. Contributors address questions such as: What are the stories and histories through which people respond to their nations development? What is the everyday social environment of groups living in highly diverse areas (migrant settlements, urban villages, remote communities)? They seek to contribute to a creative and dynamic grass-roots response to the demands of everyday life and local-global pressures. While the overdeveloped world faces an intersecting crisis created by global climate change and financial instability, Papua New Guinea, with all its difficulties, still has the basis for responding to this manifold predicament. Its secret lies in what has been seen as its weakness: underdeveloped economies and communities, where people still maintain sustainable relations to each other and the natural world.

Working on the sustainability of local communities with a “community-engaged” research methodology

Abstract The Globalism Institute at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University in Melbourne is conducting research on local responses to globalisation across 10 local communities in seven different countries. The projects “community-engaged research methodology” was developed first in the Hamilton region in southwest Victoria, where staff from the university have been working in community partnerships for nearly 20 years. This research methodology differs from action research in that it sustains a clear distinction between the knowledge and skills of “outside” researchers and the hard-won local knowledge of community members. It is based on respectful dialogue and a clear commitment to maintain relationships for a matter of years rather than weeks. It involves the creation of “spaces for engagement” that can lead to multiple, sometimes unexpected, outcomes. It integrates a range of research methods (including surveys, story collection, strategic conversations, photo-narrative techniques, and research journals) that generate rich data to be used (subject to consent) by both community-based and university-based researchers. The research methods are linked to forms of analysis that relate local experiences to broader social processes. Community-engaged research takes time and patience but it can ensure good feedback and support mechanisms, good-quality data, locally relevant research outcomes and a process that can be convivial for all involved.

Lessons for long-term social recovery following the 2004 tsunami: Community, livelihoods, tourism and housing

The Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 galvanized world attention like no other natural disaster before. Unprecedented amounts of aid were given and a record number of international aid agencies were involved in relief and recovery operations. Major reviews of the response to the disaster have suggested that the immediate relief effort was better than expected. However, weaknesses in the longer term recovery work were identified within months of the disaster and yet the same weaknesses were being confirmed four and five years later. Even though many studies have been published on the tsunami disaster there are still many lessons to be learnt, particularly in relation to social recovery as distinct from the restoration of destroyed or damaged infrastructure. This paper presents an overview of the findings of a study that was conducted over a period of four years across five different tsunami-affected local areas of Sri Lanka and southern India. The study focused on lessons to be learnt in relation to rebuilding community, restoring livelihoods, recreating an appropriate tourism industry and providing relevant housing and planned settlements for disaster survivors. The paper argues that ‘build back better’ is possible, but only if ‘asset replacement’ strategies are replaced by integrated physical and social planning to address local needs in culturally appropriate ways. Much of what the authors advocate may seem to be little more than ‘common sense’ and many of our findings echo those of many other post-tsunami evaluations. Yet patient and well-integrated approaches to disaster recovery are all too rare in a world that is experiencing so many natural disasters. Because the 2004 tsunami evoked an unprecedented global response it is important to ensure that the lessons of the recovery effort are clearly learnt and this paper aims to convert research findings into a clear strategy for long-term social recovery.

Scenarios for Engaging a Rural Australian Community in Climate Change Adaptation Work

The Hamilton region in Victoria, Australia is a rural farming community consisting of several small towns and the regional center of Hamilton. The region is already experiencing climate change, with a steady decline in annual rainfall and available groundwater, and increased frequency of droughts. A prolonged drought has necessitated ongoing water restrictions and forced farmers to alter cropping and stocking practices. Rainfall patterns are predicted to shift further toward the dry, which will affect farm viability, as will increased transport costs due to rising oil prices. The challenges the community face have led to a high local interest in understanding and responding to climate change. When the authors organized a public meeting in April 2007, over 70 people attended. They wanted to take immediate action on climate change, not wait for new national policies.

Building Local Responses to Disaster Lessons from the 2004 Tsunami in Sri Lanka and India

While there has been much discussion in international disaster management literature in recent years of the need to give affected communities much more ‘ownership’ of recovery and rehabilitation pro-jects and programs, there is little real understanding of what this might mean in practice. There are many calls for post-disaster recovery programs to reduce vulnerability to future risks, or to ‘build back better’. Drawing from an intense study of social recovery and community rebuilding across five tsunami-affected local areas in Sri Lanka and southern India, this article affirms the need for greater community ‘guidance’ of disaster recovery but it argues that different forms of community engagement are required for different stages in the long process from relief to recovery. It argues that ‘build back better’ is possible, but only if aid and other related agencies work more closely with existing capacities for resilience within the affected communities and contribute towards their legitimacy.