Introduction
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) sixth assessment report confirmed that climate change is already affecting every region on earth and the changes are expected to be widespread, rapid and intensifying (IPCC, 2021). For the Asia Pacific region, climate change is predicted to increase the intensity and frequency of disasters (UNESCAP, 2017). The Philippines, ranked as the third most disaster-prone country in the world, regularly experiences hazards such as typhoons, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions (CFE-DM, 2018). The country experienced the world’s strongest typhoon, Typhoon Haiyan, on 8 November 2013, with maximum sustained winds of 190 mph (World Vision, 2020). The official death toll was recorded at 6,293 (NDRRMC, 2014) but NGOs and those on the ground predict the real number is closer to 15,000 to 18,000 (IBON, 2015). It has been estimated that the homes of 90 per cent of residents of Tacloban (population 242,000) were affected (Davis and Alexander, 2016). These frequent disasters contribute to loss of life, severe infrastructure damage and have significant impacts on the nation’s economic growth and labour market outcomes (UN OCHA, 2020; Kirchberger, 2017; Felbermayr and Gröschl, 2014).
Indeed, disasters disrupt the fabric of community life and undermine the capacity of affected households to recover from shocks, thereby creating a need for affected countries as well as affected populations to devise mechanisms for resilience after disasters (Tan-Mullins et al., 2020). The increasing incidence of disasters in the Philippines has elicited the need to draw the country closer to a more transparent understanding of post-disaster resilience (Eadie, 2019). But the heavy use of the concept of resilience in the context of disasters has triggered concerns for how to define and operationalise it. One of the biggest discrepancies is that while only local people know their own needs and only they can define their own priorities, disaster resilience frameworks and programmes often lack local voices for practical implementation (Atienza et al., 2016; Murphy et al., 2018; Moatty et al., 2017). And when local input from disaster-affected households is included, their understanding of resilience is often filtered through expert and professional opinions.
Historically, disaster studies have failed to ground research in local realities (Gaillard, 2018; Altbach, 2004) and research on post-disaster recovery and resilience is usually done about people experiencing risk rather than being done by or with them (Jigyasu, 2005). In addition, local actors are often stripped of their political agency and reduced to victims that are merely surviving or recovering from hazards (Sou, 2021; Chandler, 2012; Bohle et al., 2019). These troubling trends led a collective of researchers organised under J-C. Gaillard to write ‘Power, Prestige and Forgotten Values: A Disaster Studies Manifesto’ to ‘inspire and inform more respectful, reciprocal and genuine relationships between “local” and “external” researchers in disaster studies’ (Gaillard et al., 2019). The Manifesto advocates for research that is locally led and locally driven, noting that ‘research should be framed from locally appropriate, culturally grounded perspectives and methodologies which must be similarly developed and critiqued’ (Gaillard et al., 2019).
To overcome these concerns, adhere to the principles of the Manifesto, and respond to calls to contextualise resilience, this study is led by local researchers to examine local conceptions and articulations of resilience by disaster-affected people from the grassroots level in Tacloban City. As Haiyan survivors, the two local researchers have experienced at first hand how local perceptions and experiences are filtered through external expert and professional opinions to conform to humanitarian agendas (Hsu et al., 2019; Murphy et al., 2018). In the case of Haiyan, it was clear that the concept of resilience that was behind most of the recovery programming was constructed through humanitarian organisations and foreign experts. For example, the national framework of the government’s strategic plan for post-Haiyan recovery and reconstruction adapts the foreign concept of ‘Build Back Better’, which refers to restoring the economic and social conditions of affected areas at the very least to their pre-typhoon levels and to a higher level of resilience (RAY, 2013). Yet, how can higher levels of resilience be achieved when the concept does not resonate locally? Studies have found that when resilience is largely constructed through the perspectives of humanitarian actors or the state, the implementation of resilience-building programmes is challenging (Sou, 2021; Murphy et al., 2018; Su and Le Dé 2020).
As such, disaster resilience remains a filtered concept because of the lack of context of the term as it is interpreted and implemented for disaster-affected households by non-locals (Hsu et al., 2019; Atienza et al., 2019). The absence of a direct translation of resilience in the local Waray language may create filtered and out-of-context notions of the concept. The unfiltered part of resilience is highlighted and emphasised when studies are led by local researchers who are grounded in the social and cultural context of the community being studied. With local researchers leading the research rather than external researchers, they begin to unfilter the concept through local narratives and cultural contexts through the exposure of their own localities at risk and local disasters (Gaillard, 2018; Murphy et al., 2018). The filtered root causes of vulnerability and capacities of local people are uncovered when research is framed from locally appropriate and culturally grounded perspectives of local experts (Hsu et al., 2019; Su and Le Dé, 2020). Despite the resilience-oriented interventions made by humanitarians, Haiyan-affected households in Tacloban City, Philippines still perceived resilience based on their local contexts, anchored on their needs and priorities. To explore this, we investigate the following questions: how do disaster-affected households understand resilience after Typhoon Haiyan? How do food, financial capacity and psychosocial status influence these contextualised meanings of resilience?
This introduction has provided the rationale for why this paper is important for both academic literature and practical achievement of household resilience. The next section provides an overview of disaster resilience and wealth and psychosocial dimensions of resilience. The following section presents the methodology, setting up the results and discussion section. The concluding section returns to our key questions and addresses both practical and academic insights from the study.
Disaster Resilience
Murphy et al. (2018) argued that resilience is a largely theoretical concept that has been driven from the top down and, as such, lacks local voice and a means for practical implementation. From the grass-roots level, it is rarely understood and often receives little attention. In the context of disaster risk reduction (DRR), definitions of risk and resilience are primarily based on the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 (UNDRR, 2020). The definition of resilience under the framework includes ‘the ability of a system, community or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate, adapt to, transform, and recover from the effects of hazards in a timely and efficient manner, including through the preservation and restoration of its essential basic structures and functions through risk management’ (UNDRR, 2020:11). The objective and ‘expert-led’ definition of key terms on DRR such as resilience creates an operational gap in achieving an inclusive and contextualised climate and disaster risk plan that the United Nations Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework emphasises (UNDRR, 2020; Hsu et al., 2019). The Cooperation Framework demonstrates the value of climate and disaster-risk informed development while supporting communities in using climate and disaster risk management approaches to build disaster resilience (UNDRR, 2020). Too often the input of disaster-affected households is asked but filtered through expert and professional opinions (Hsu et al., 2019; Murphy et al., 2018). When resilience is largely constructed through the perspectives of humanitarian actors, implementation of resilience-building strategies is proven to be challenging (Murphy et al., 2018).
Wealth and Psychosocial Dimensions of Resilience
The study employs two of the seven dimensions of resilience (wealth, debt and credit, coping behaviours, human capital, community networks, protection and security, and psychosocial status) presented by Tulane University’s Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy (DRLA) and the State University of Haiti (UEH), namely wealth and psychosocial status. This framework is employed because the theme of resilience gathered from a disaster-impacted community after the 2010 Haiti earthquake is applicable and relevant to post-Haiyan Tacloban City. Although debt and credit, coping behaviours, human capital, community networks and protection and security are important dimensions of the resilience framework, wealth and psychosocial status were considered as priorities and most significant to restore by Tacloban households to achieve household resilience among the other dimensions mentioned, hence the focus of this study.
The DRLA and UEH (2012) emphasise the importance of wealth as one of the most substantial dimensions to cope with, recover from and adapt to the impacts of disasters. The wealth dimension encompasses indicators such as food consumption and financial assistance which are necessary to build resilience in local communities. Similarly, the DRLA and UEH (2012) also highlight psychosocial status as a dimension of resilience as the psychological condition and well-being of household members is often adversely affected in the short term and potentially long term depending, in part, upon the effectiveness of the household’s ties.
Wealth is a significant dimension of resilience because access to debt and credit, savings and other income-generating services is indispensable to mitigate costs from critical shocks (DRLA and UEH, 2012; Birhanu et al., 2017). Existing research suggest that communities with diverse options of livelihood are deemed to have a higher level of adaptive capacity to disasters (Le Dé et al., 2013; Hanazaki et al., 2013). However, not everyone in a community has the same access to livelihoods or financial services. For example, the regularity of access to financial resources is often a burden for the poor, considering that they are not able to gain access to credit and savings, thus contributing further to their inability to rebuild after a calamity. Le Dé et al.’s (2015) research in Samoa after Cyclone Evan in 2012 found that households that did not have access to remittances or a guarantor overseas were unable to access large loans from the bank for the purposes of rebuilding their houses. Excluded from formal sources of lending, the poor rely heavily on informal financial services such as predatory money lenders and sophisticated financial transactions extended by their personal ties and translocal networks to acquire much needed financial resources (Jacobsen et al., 2009; Ciani, 2012). As such, financial inclusion is deemed as a means to an end for resilience (Hudner et al., 2015; Jacobsen et al., 2009). Financial resilience aids in upholding both household and community resilience.
The DRLA and UEH highlights that not only is a household’s social network helpful for securing resources related to wealth, but other studies have found that local networks and ties tend to offer psychosocial support (Rockenbauch, 2016; Iacoviello and Charney, 2014). Iacoviello and Charney (2014) stress that very few people, especially those impacted by wars and disasters, can survive the psychological stress and trauma. People survive because of social support networks. Indeed, Aldrich (2012) argues that social capital is the core driver of post-disaster recovery; and studies have found that disaster-affected communities are often the first to respond in emergencies (Su and Mangada, 2017; Le Dé et al., 2013; Eadie and Su, 2018). These safety nets, which are usually close relationships with people such as family members, friends, spiritual leaders and others, provide emotional strength (Eadie and Su, 2018). Panzarella et al. (2006) concur that having social support in place can protect a person from ‘hopelessness and the negative psychological outcomes of trauma’. Moreover, the ability to draw on material or financial support from family and friends may have a substantial impact on routine coping and in dealing with unforeseen circumstances (Curley et al., 2010).
Methodology
This research employed an in-depth and qualitative approach that focused on investigating the household’s local understandings of resilience in a post-Haiyan context in Tacloban City. The research locale is a barangay (smallest unit of governance in the Philippines) in Sagkahan, which is one of the barangays that was greatly devastated by Haiyan due to its proximity to the coastline. Unlike other barangays that were heavily affected by Haiyan, Sagkahan residents were not relocated because its location 200 to 800 meters from the coastline puts it well beyond the government’s 40-meter no-build zone (Figure 1). This allowed our team to gather substantive primary data from household members who experienced Haiyan but were not relocated. As of 2020, approximately 75,000 people from about 15,000 households have relocated to the 31 resettlement sites (Tacloban City Housing and Community Development Office, 2020).
Residents of Sagkahan are primarily lower income households. It is a densely populated settlement near the coastline. Given their proximity to the water, the residents experienced at first hand the typhoon’s ferocious winds and 7.5-meter storm surge (NASA, 2013). Their primary experience and their local socio-economic contexts allowed them to express narratives of resilience around their experiences during and after Haiyan. Additionally, nearly four years after Haiyan, the barangay received various forms of governmental and international aid including many resilience-oriented interventions and programmes. These variety of programmes and how the people received, experienced and actioned resilience allow us to document the various local understandings of resilience and the factors that influence these understandings.
Data Collection
We utilised the following procedures in determining individual research respondents. First we requested an official list of Sagkahan’s 310 households. This list served as our sampling frame; considering the population, we aimed to interview 10 per cent of the total number of households. We identified the respondents through the following criteria: the interviewee must be the head of the household (which could be the father/husband or mother/wife) or, in the absence of the two, someone who is regarded as the household head (e.g. eldest in the household).
The research team conducted two-hour in-depth interviews in the local language of Waray to get an understanding of local people’s contextualised meanings on post-disaster resilience. This allowed local researchers to enable questions and gather responses which further allow for non-Western perspectives to emerge from the interviews that better reflect the realities of affected households. When local researchers lead the research as opposed to Western experts, it advances a methodology of conducting researches that empowers local experts and challenges Western worldviews and ways of knowing, especially when these have been imposed as common sense (Gaillard et al., 2019). Applications of Western theories and methodologies should be limited to contexts where they make sense; that is, from the places where they emerged.
Interviews were done on a household level to capture household dimensions of resilience and household perceptions on resilience based on their key priorities and as a basic unit. A total of 31 in-depth interviews were conducted in the barangay from March to May 2017. The number of interviews is small because of the difficulty of talking to locals about their understanding of foreign concepts. To avoid alienating the participants by making them feel they did not know the ‘right answer’, our study focused on a general discussion about the household’s post-disaster recovery. In addition, a great deal of time was spent to build rapport with the respondents to make them feel comfortable and at ease when discussing their experience of Haiyan and their understanding of humanitarian interventions.
Map of Sagkahan, Barangay 62-A, Tacloban City, Philippines
Citation: Journal of Humanitarian Affairs 4, 1; 10.7227/JHA.078
Local Researchers as Experts in Local Conditions
While many participants were able to discuss this topic, it was very challenging to get them to dig deeper and provide the reasons why they have such perceptions and meanings attached to resilience. One of the reasons is because all disaster-affected households were first exposed to the idea of ‘resilience’ by humanitarian organisations through their resilience-oriented programmes after Haiyan. Despite the absence of a direct Waray translation, the experience surrounding resilience is still present and therefore the local knowledge of local researchers is so significant. As Haiyan survivors themselves, the local researchers could make participants more comfortable in telling their own stories about Haiyan because they understand the context. These similar experiences served as the medium for participants to freely express their post-Haiyan experiences without being boxed in by a definition provided by international humanitarian organisations. It also made the respondents feel like they were talking to a neighbour as opposed to a foreign researcher. Local researchers were able to solicit unfiltered stories of resilience from the disaster-affected households without limiting what they have to say. This also prevented the continuous displacement of the participants’ mother tongue in favour of another language (Oyzon, 2012). This also opened doors for self-reflexivity, empathy and ethical commitments in the work of knowledge production and its practical applications (Docot, 2017). Local researchers as ‘experts’ in local conditions can document locally appropriate, culturally grounded and unfiltered perspectives and experiences of local people on post-disaster resilience. While having a survivor interview another survivor poses the risk of overfamiliarity, it could ensure a dialogue where no individual or group puts itself in a situation where it can unilaterally decide the final outcomes of the conversation.
Results
Household Profile of Affected Households
Nearly four years after Haiyan struck, many households have had their livelihoods restored but most respondents had not yet recovered all their physical assets. A total of 23 participants (74%) indicated that their houses were totally destroyed during Haiyan, and 8 of the households’ houses (25%) experienced considerable damage. The other losses that have been incurred include appliances and sari-sari stores (small convenience stores that are operated out of peoples’ homes).
In addition, households emphasised that their incomes could not sustain most, if not all, of their needs. This result is likely due to unstable jobs and low incomes. Conversations with participants revealed that households earn irregularly as dressmakers, vendors and construction workers. Participants also expressed difficulty in earning enough to contribute to their monthly savings, declaring, ‘Waray na sosobra. Ha mga baraydan la nangangadto. Waray nasesavings. Tubtob la mga baraydan (No money left. All is being used for bills and expenses. We are not able to have savings. [Income] is only allotted for bills and expenses)’. Those that did have savings stored in banks, cooperatives or micro-financing companies, claimed ‘waray na kahulugi ([we] weren’t able to deposit money [savings] anymore)’. Others revealed that they incurred debts instead of savings, with one participant sharing, ‘Waray savings. Utang lugod ([We have] no savings. [We have] debts instead)’. There are also justifications that formal and informal financial services are appropriate and necessary in the backdrop following from disasters in order to mitigate costs from critical shocks. Access to debt and credit, savings and other income-generating services is indispensable to mitigate costs from critical shocks. However, the regularity of access to financial resources is often a burden for the poor considering that they are not able to gain access to credit and savings, thus contributing further to their inability to rebuild after a calamity (Demirgüç-Kunt et al., 2015).
Subjective Understandings of Resilience
A handful of participants were not familiar with the term ‘resilience’. In fact, when asked, ‘Para haim, ano iton household resilience? (In your mind, what does household resilience mean?)’, some households answered ‘Diri ak maaram (I do not know)’. Most participants reported that they have heard ‘resilience’ mentioned in programmes conducted by their barangays, schools and NGOs after Haiyan, but many see it as a foreign term. However, there was also a wide variation of conceptions of resilience and bouncing back from disasters from the participants’ experiences on the ground, suggesting that there is a wider variation in contextualising and understanding of what resilience is and how resilience plays a part in the households’ daily lives after Haiyan. For example, one participant stated ‘pagtuo hit Ginoo (faith in God)’. Households view faith as an important factor of their personal and familial strength in the face of disaster, in which such strength allows them to be ‘resilient’ (Wilkinson, 2015). Table 1 provides a breakdown of the percentage of respondents that cited the various subjective understandings of resilience.
Subjective understandings on wealth and psychosocial dimensions of resilience
| Dimension of resilience (n = 31) | Subjective understandings | Percentage of citing respondents |
|---|---|---|
| Food resilience | Able to eat three times a day with snacks | 16 (51%) |
| Able to consume not only vegetables but also ‘delicious foods’ | 1 (3%) | |
| Able to buy food from money sent by social ties after disaster | 7 (23%) | |
| Able to eat from food sent by social ties after disaster | 7 (23%) | |
| Financial resilience | Adequate financial resources for household | 6 (19%) |
| Stable job and income | 25 (81%) | |
| Psychosocial resilience | Lessened disaster-induced anxiety and stress | 4 (13%) |
| Fully recovered from trauma and experiences during Typhoon Haiyan | 24 (77%) | |
| Not anymore anxious when it rains very hard | 3 (10%) |
In addition, character and attitude towards adversities were significant factors influencing the understanding of resilience. Participants consistently perceive their households as resilient when they strongly face challenges in life both in thought and in actions, bounce back from difficulties, and help others. While participants who have previously experienced negative psychological outcomes of trauma and hopelessness after the disaster viewed resilience as when ‘basta it pamilya okay la (family is doing fine)’, resilience also meant ‘magpreparar ngan kailangan may head of family nga makusog it fighting spirit para maging madig-on (being prepared and needing a family head who has a strong fighting spirit)’ to put social support in place (Panzarella et al., 2006). These local conceptualisations of resilience are not captured by Western concepts of resilience as ‘bouncing forward’ and/or eventually thriving (Davies, 1993; Manyena, 2006).
Wealth and Psychosocial Dimensions of Resilience
The wealth dimension of resilience is divided into two parts: food resilience and financial resilience (DRLA and UEH, 2012).
Food resilience
The frequency of meals, kinds of food, and support from a household’s social capital networks are factors participants consider in how they form their understanding and conception of resilience. Participants eating three to four meals a day perceived their household as food-resilient, whereas participants consuming only vegetables perceived themselves to be the least food-resilient. As one respondent mentioned, ‘Diri gud madig-on kay puro la utan, waray magrasa na pagkaon ([We are] not food resilient because we only have vegetables for our meals, none of any delicious foods)’.
Like other studies, we found that social capital in the form of local and translocal ties have built household resilience through sharing food, sending money for meals and/or accommodating survivors immediately after disaster (Pacoma and Delda, 2019; Su and Mangada, 2017; Aldrich and Sawada, 2015; Eadie and Su, 2018). Most participants reported that their food resilience was built from the food assistance provided by their own social ties. This supports prior literature that found that a resilience-based approach to food insecurity is through a household’s large and varied ties, enabling the household to be connected to more ‘arenas’ (Ciani, 2012). This can give them access to resources, hence promoting resilience to food insecurity. A common example provided by participants was that ‘family members and friends would send money used to buy rice and other food essentials’.
However, we found that food resilience was also often built merely from the household’s own efforts; a common sentiment expressed by respondents was that this was because their ‘parehas la it amon mga kabutang (ties are situated in the same condition)’. In other words, households located in the same devastated area lose their ability to contribute and share resources such as food with other households because of the local perception that ‘waray tawo nga mas maupay it kabutang (no one is better than any person)’ as every household has experienced similar devastation.
Financial resilience
Disaster-affected households’ understanding of financial resilience was also significantly influenced by job stability and irregular incomes. Almost all participants argued that financial resilience is difficult to achieve because of the ‘nagkukulang pa it kwarta (inadequacy of financial resources)’, or the lack thereof, and the ‘diri stable it sweldo (instability of income)’. A previous study of conceptualising and measuring financial resilience found that the extent to which people have sufficient resources to meet their basic needs and to anticipate and respond to inevitable change and disruption is a core factor of resilience (Salignac et al., 2019). Our findings corroborate this previous finding, since people working in precarious employment or those unemployed were found to be less financially resilient than the general population due to their irregular incomes.
Additionally, access to financial resources was indicative of both preservation and restoration of the households’ functions after disaster. Most respondents’ perception of financial resilience is built around the household’s access to material and social resources. For example, participants who have immediate family members abroad received more financial help compared to participants with relatives in the Philippines. A family member abroad usually sends about 10,000 PHP (Philippine pesos) to 20,000 PHP compared to 600 PHP to 1,500 PHP sent by relatives within the country. The financial assistance provided by these ties was used for house repair, food or for capital for starting a business.
Psychosocial resilience
Supporting the observation that most participants claimed to be already resilient psychosocially, 29 participants (93%) indicated that their psychosocial status had improved, since there were no casualties recorded within their household since Haiyan. Exchange of experiences and personal care from the households’ ties are significant factors in how households understood and contextualised psychosocial resilience. Participants revealed that the psychosocial support they received helped ‘naibanan an amon kulba ngan kabaraka (lessened [disaster-induced] anxieties and stress)’.
‘Kumustahay’, understood as asking after one another, became a significant factor for understanding psychosocial resilience. Most of the participants reported that the advice they received and the conversations they had with family members and friends helped them to cope with the extent of uncertainty during and after the disaster. These findings prove the assertion presented by the DRLA and UEH (2012) that the psychological status and well-being of the affected household is often adversely affected and depends upon the effectiveness of social ties. This includes the exposure and frequent interaction of the household to such ties.
However, we found the incessant stress and trauma that household members experience at the signs of hazards such as heavy rainfall and strong winds to be one of the most important indicators considered by participants in contextualising meanings behind psychosocial resilience. Participants who experienced feelings of worry and dread as an after effect of the typhoon understood the risk behind mental and emotional stress associated with natural hazards. Most participants, particularly those with children, reported that their family have not yet fully recovered from the ‘trauma of their experiences’. While one participant mentioned that ‘may stress and trauma pa, diri pa nawawara. Kun baga nahangin or nauran nabalik la gihap an stress ngan trauma (there is still stress and trauma. The stress and trauma are experienced again if there are winds and rains)’.
Discussion
Affected communities or households must be recognised as ‘non-specialist’ experts in their own local realities to inform disaster recovery and resilience-building strategies (Hsu et al., 2019; Su and Le Dé, 2020). While households are effective interpreters and articulators of their needs and priorities, the recognition and integration of those needs and concerns, which do not fall within dominant resilience frameworks, ensure locally appropriate, suitable, sustainable resilience programmes and policies (Sou, 2019). According to Eadie (2019), the increasingly frequent and intense climate-change threats to urban coastal areas in Southeast Asia highlights the need for resilience specific to local socio-economic contexts of communities or households if they are to be sustainable, effective and properly understood.
Murphy et al. (2018) concurred that promotion of local viewpoints in crisis and disaster response is essential in enhancing local capacities and in improving humanitarian interventions in the context of the ‘Build Back Better’ agenda. However, post-Haiyan Tacloban City has been characterised by ‘build back better’ narratives promoted by the government, humanitarian organisations and the media over local perspectives of crisis survivors (Curato and Su, 2018; Flinn, 2020). Overall, participants in the barangay in Sagkahan, Tacloban City provided a wide variation in the understanding of resilience. Non-tangible variables such as faith in God, family cohesion and preparedness against natural hazards have significantly been influential for households in contextualising meanings of ‘resilience’ from the ground. Resilience was a recurring theme in the post-Haiyan programmes of schools, barangays and NGOs for affected communities.
Eadie’s (2019) study of post-disaster resilience in Tacloban City following Haiyan also found that local understandings of resilience varied, with locals defining it as sturdy and durable, to have faith, and having regular income. Relatedly, we expect that respondents understand resilience as speaking of personal determination to overcome difficulties because resilience is not an indigenous term but mattered simply for how the households understood, experienced and actioned resilience. While it is important to include stakeholders from different backgrounds to inform climate and disaster risk management efforts, there is an emphasis on the inclusion of substantive local narratives in creating definitions of resilience, especially when it is promoted by the humanitarian community. Through the incorporation of specific contexts and local narratives of resilience, affected households may recover from the effects of hazards in a more timely and efficient manner, rather than exacerbate other risks (UNDRR, 2020).
We found that wealth and psychosocial status were the recurring themes of how participants contextualised resilience. Both food and financial resilience for the respondents involve access to material and social resources from the household’s social capital. Being able to eat three to four meals a day was an important factor for food resiliency among respondents, probably because household members were more likely to enjoy preservation and restoration of food capacity after the disaster. The change in food consumption and eating patterns were suggestive of a negative coping strategy that does little to promote resilience (Islam and Walkerden, 2014; Eadie and Su, 2018). Most participants reported that their food resilience was built from the food assistance provided by their own social ties. Relatedly, a study by Ciani (2012) on the resilience-based approach to food insecurity proved that a household’s large and varied ties can enable the household to be connected to a larger ‘arena’ that can give them access to resources, hence promoting resilience to food insecurity.
Regular jobs and stability of incomes were core factors in respondents’ understanding of financial resilience (Salignac et al., 2019). Many respondents with unstable incomes stated that they were not financially resilient because their income is insufficient to cover their household’s needs. However, access to financial resources through respondent’s social capital was also considered an important factor in defining financial resilience. But their helpfulness hinged on their geographical location as those close to them were equally affected by the disaster. So, extra-local or international connections proved more useful in sending financial help. This finding supports other studies on post-disaster social capital that found international networks have the potential to foster resilience to climate-related risks because their geographical distance gives them more capacity to give resources like remittances (Rockenbauch, 2016; Su and Mangada, 2017; Elliott et al., 2010).
Social support in place provides emotional strength and can protect a person from the negative outcomes of psychological distress (Iacoviello and Charney, 2014; Panzarella et al., 2006). However, we also found incessant stress at the signs of natural hazards to be an important factor of contextualised meaning of resilience. This is consistent with Birhanu et al.’s (2017) findings that people might also express their psychological distress through fear and anxiety when already observing signs of drought or other climate hazards. In our study, participants expressed greatest concern against their psychosocial resilience when signs of a typhoon were observed.
Incorporating subjective understanding of resilience is likewise important in ensuring effective and sustainable measures in specific stages of the disaster lifecycle. Kenney et al. (2015) contend that the Maori population of Christchurch after the major earthquake in 2011, were able to draw on their cultural norms and social structures as a coping capacity; therefore, the social structure of indigenous populations like that of the Maori population can be harnessed to improve community resilience (Tiernan et al., 2018). Capitalising on the various conceptions of resilience as perceived by disaster-affected people especially in the response and recovery period after disaster would be beneficial in any effort in building resilience.
Conclusion
Overarching rhetoric and strategies of resilience dominated the Asia Pacific region due to increasing climate change related threats to its urban coastal areas. Local narratives of resilience in the region stemming from local aspirations, values and knowledge are still often neglected by top-down resilience-building strategies that emphasise objective and ‘expert-led’ solutions (Hsu et al., 2019; Gaillard et al., 2019). And when local input from disaster-affected households is included, their understanding of resilience is often filtered through these same expert and professional opinions. Subjective understanding of resilience from the ground is relevant to defining and operationalising resilience amid the operational gap between disaster-affected households and the humanitarian community on effective and sustainable resilience-building strategies. In this paper, we have demonstrated the unfiltered understanding of resilience by disaster-affected households.
Haiyan-affected households in Tacloban City, Philippines embodied their own local perceptions of resilience despite various resilience-oriented interventions promoted by humanitarian organisations in the city. Participants were engaged in an in-depth and informal discussion on resilience which allowed them to freely express how they understood resilience without prejudice to their answers. This was done to analyze and study the possible narratives and perceptions of resilience from the grass-roots level.
Reported perspectives of disaster survivors on the meaning of resilience reflects household priorities and needs (e.g. the need for stable job and income, food security and psychosocial care). The subjective understanding of resilience emphasised local leadership, through promotion of local viewpoints, and yet being able to access social support when needed. Skills, knowledge, information and capacity to meet household needs while having access to social networks for support is key to building resilience (Murphy et al., 2018). Sustainability and effectiveness of resilience-building strategies is linked to local aspirations for well-being. A holistic understanding of resilience to disasters and climate extremes should consider local viewpoints alongside the indicators presented by an objective framework for measuring resilience.
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank Jake S. Delda for his recommendations on the development of the paper.
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