Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation (31 page)

Comfort
et al.
(1999) identify austerity measures required by externally imposed structural adjustment programmes as the impetus for cutbacks in public services such as health and transportation, which are in turn responsible for reductions in the capacity of local and national governments to respond effectively to the disaster. Olson
et al.
(2001) provide evidence of how these policies affected Civil
Defence where almost half of the 58 officer positions distributed across seven regional offices were not filled.

From October 21–31 1998 the western and northern coasts as well as the central region of Nicaragua experienced from three to five times the rainfall ever recorded. According to the Nicaraguan government Hurricane Mitch destroyed or damaged 151,215 homes, 512 schools, 140 health centres, 5,695 roads and 1,933 bridges. The government confirmed 3,045 people dead as a result of the disaster (Olson
et al.
, 2001). These human and material losses occurred in a country with a population of only 4.5 million people. Two thirds of the total fatalities associated with the storm occurred in one ghastly ‘disaster within a disaster’:

The single most horrific event occurred in Nicaragua on October 30, 1998, when the side of the Casita volcano collapsed. Loose volcanic ash accumulated from centuries of eruptions became a deadly flow of mud and debris known as a lahar. During the night, it hurtled downhill at speeds of up to 60 miles an hour for seven miles, burying 2,000 people in the villages of El Porvernir and Rolando Rodriguez. (USAID, 2005:4)

The magnitude of the national disaster was not due to a lack of an early warning system. Meteorologists from INETER tracked and duly reported the location and acceleration of the storm (INETER, 1998), providing the government with the information it possessed in a timely and efficient manner. But this was not sufficient: knowledge of the hazardous geology and population at risk was not available and had certainly not been acted on to reduce development of this area (USGS, 1999). Risk was produced as a result of a combined lack of appropriate scientific knowledge and an underlying political economy that allowed, or forced, the poor to colonise a hazardous location. Political inaction aggravated the impact of Mitch. Despite the enormity of the environmental phenomenon taking place, and several days into what was becoming a regional catastrophe, President Alemán failed to act on government ministers’ advice that a state of emergency should be declared and evacuations and rescue missions organised. In an essay published shortly after the disaster, the Director of the Nicaraguan Centre of International Studies, Alejandro Bendaña, suggests that one reason President Alemán refused to initiate a massive, organised emergency operation to mitigate the effects of the storm was that this sort of action would be reminiscent of the populist campaigns conducted by his political nemesis, the Sandinistas: ‘No he said, such a mobilization would be something that the Sandinistas would do – and he certainly was no Sandinista’ (Bendaña, 1999).

The president’s refusal to respond appropriately to the needs of the Nicaraguan population before and after the storm was judged by international analysts as likely to result in political fallout:

Assessments of the political impact of the hurricane are necessarily highly tentative at this stage. However, early indications suggest that in the medium term, the disaster may lead to an increase in popular opposition to the
government of President Arnoldo Alemán Lacayo. For several weeks before the hurricane struck, producers had been calling for government assistance to help them cope with the impact of higher than usual rainfall through October. However, the government did not call a state of emergency until early November, after the hurricane had struck. This is likely to reinforce a growing sense among the populace that the current administration is indifferent to popular sentiment. (EIU, 1998:7, cited in Olson and Gawronski, 2003)

The partisan politics of Nicaragua were not the only hazard facing Alemán, who was also conscious of the need to conform to the expectations and conditionalities imposed by international financial institutions. His biggest concern was maintaining the approval of the International Monetary Fund:

The fact that the government hesitated greatly before even declaring a state of emergency after Mitch is evidence of a desire to avoid the responsibility for allocating massive resources to emergency assistance, thus increasing public spending and violating the conditions imposed by the structural adjustment programme. Another possible reason for not declaring a state of emergency was that a failure to mobilise large-scale human resources for the relief effort would (and did) expose the extremely limited capacity to respond to such situations by the scaled-down civil service. (Rocha and Christoplos, 2001:249)

Indeed, what led to Alemán’s political downfall and eventual conviction on multiple counts of corruption was not the loss of popular support, but the loss of support from international financial institutions. In Nicaragua authoritarianism is the norm and corruption is extremely high, but these issues have typically remained low on the list of popular concerns (IDESO, 2001). President Alemán’s top-down and personalised approach to governance and his stunningly high level of corruption before and after Mitch (Walker, 2000) failed to significantly change pre-existing popular opinion of regime legitimacy. However, carrying out the Washington consensus required that the leadership maintain international legitimacy. When this was lost and it became clear that international players favoured Enrique Bolaños it set off a chain reaction as Alemán’s support network realigned itself to accept the new internationally approved leader, and abandoned Alemán to his fate. A change in president had been affected, but this served to strengthen the neo-liberal orientation of government so that ideological regime change was not achieved.

Human security has not prospered under neo-liberalism. Effective risk management has not met expectations post-Mitch in El Salvador or Nicaragua (Wisner, 2000) despite receiving international aid and adopting a national rhetoric of ‘learning the lessons of Mitch’, neoliberal state restructuring has precluded their implementation. Comfort
et al.
(1999) use the Honduran and Nicaraguan cases to support their argument that risk and hazard mitigation strategies should be integrated into social policy, especially development schemes. They point
to ways in which the shift in the social contract under neoliberalism from local to global interests is given material expression through land use and ultimately the distributions of risk in society.

Hurricane Mitch was remarkable because of the tremendous loss of life, social upheaval and economic devastation that it wrought but also because of the various local, national, regional, international and especially supranational responses it engendered. The restructuring of Central American states to conform to the United States’ political and economic agenda for the post-Cold War period, which is sometimes referred to as the Washington Consensus, did not of course begin with Hurricane Mitch. However, this disaster gave the United States, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and the Inter-American Development Bank a platform from which to further their visions for region-wide transformation. Indeed the name adopted by the group of advisors was the Consultative Group for the Reconstruction and Transformation of Central America, and its logo states that ‘reconstruction must not be at the expense of transformation’. The second meeting of this group, held in Stockholm 25–8 May 1999, resulted in the ‘Stockholm Declaration’ in which six goals were elaborated:

• Reduce the social and ecological vulnerability of the region, as the overriding goal.

• Reconstruct and transform Central America on the basis of an integrated approach of transparency and good governance.

• Consolidate democracy and good governance, reinforcing the process of decentralisation of governmental functions and powers, with the active participation of civil society.

• Promote respect for human rights as a permanent objective. The promotion of equality between men and women, the rights of children, of ethnic groups and other minorities should be given special attention.

• Coordinate donor efforts, guide by priorities set by the recipient countries.

• Intensify efforts to reduce the external debt burden of the region.

These were exciting times. Disaster management – in other words, proactive, integrated climate change adaptation – had been explicitly tied to the goals of inclusive governance, decentralised power, citizen participation, the promotion of human rights and debt reduction. A number if assessments of progress have, unfortunately, not found these goals to have been met (Christoplos
et al.
, 2009). Even shortly after the declaration Rocha and Christoplos (2001) observe that while some conceptual advances were made at the national level, such as the recognition that more appropriate agricultural practices and soil conservation may mitigate future disasters, and that environmental concerns such as forest fires and extensive clear cutting for cattle ranching must be addressed, not all post-Mitch initiatives were working to reduce risk. For example, the World Bank proposed to the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry that they establish a publicly financed scheme of ‘rainfall insurance’, which would reimburse farmers’ losses during times of drought or flooding:

The economic justification for such a programme is to encourage farmers to adopt higher risk strategies. Agro-ecological risk-reduction practices, such as inter-cropping, are described as obstacles to achieving maximum potential production. The argument is that if farmers knew that they would be reimbursed for losses they would take the risk of abandoning agro-ecological production techniques in order to obtain greater profit. (Rocha and Christoplos, 2001:243)

As with other areas of political life, discursive competition was decisive in shaping policy. Feeding the Stockholm Declaration goals through the dominant neo-liberal lens had some curious but perhaps not surprising results. In the name of improving state performance, while some advances were made in citizen participation and corruption, more marked was support for large scale privatisation of state assets including sale of the state-owned telephone company, the restructuring of the electrical company, the private administration of water supply and the opening of the petroleum sector to private investors (IADB, 1999).

Rocha and Christoplos (2001) conclude that any impact on policies or their implementation is doubtful. This is for structural reasons that extend beyond the state and the influence of international institutions: ‘The isolation of NGOs, as elite institutions with little base in true civil society, must be broken if they are to become a vehicle for the integration of disaster mitigation and preparedness concerns in national policies and institutional practice’ (Rocha and Christoplos, 2001:250).

Demeritt
et al.
(2005) argue that international financial institutions fostered government policy in post-Mitch Nicaragua have promoted the liberal modernising of the state through the legal creation of a disaster prevention system (SINAPRED). This structurally links virtually all state ministries, while at the same time privatising key state services converting Nicaragua into a lucrative site for transnational disaster prevention agencies. The continuing transnationalisation of security in Nicaragua has resulted in the creation of a cohort of high level bureaucrats who are ostensibly responsible for designing and orchestrating a national disaster prevention plan; however, their primary work consists of middle-managing foreign projects and their work product is monitored and evaluated by World Bank officials, not the Nicaraguan people (Demeritt
et al.
, 2005).

Hurricane Katrina has become a touchstone event in the USA. It demonstrates well the deep social, and in this case racial, determinants of individual adaptive capacity and vulnerability and the ways in which successive administrative systems failed first to mediate in the urban development that generated exposure and then to respond to the disaster and recovery. The disaster brought scrutiny and questions of legitimacy for local and national politicians, leading to reform in technical and administrative systems but limited indication of transformational reform. The lack of transformation is not for want of alternative
visions or discourses but the failure of these to overcome popular rejection of politics and the dilution of political power through privatisation, which simultaneously removes public accountability (see below).

Michael Dyson (2006) found racial inequity in New Orleans an important enough factor in the Katrina disaster to begin his book with a discussion of some of the social conditions that reproduce it:

New Orleans has a 40 percent literacy rate: over 50 percent of black ninth graders will not graduate in four years … Louisiana expends an average of $4,724 per student and has the third-lowest rank for teacher salaries in the nation. The black dropout rates are high and nearly 50,000 students cut class every day. When they are done with school, many young black males end up at Angola Prison, a correctional facility located on a former plantation where inmates still perform manual labor and where 90% of them will eventually die. New Orleans’s employment picture is equally gloomy, since industry long ago deserted the city, leaving in its place a service economy that caters to tourists and that thrives on low-paying, transient and unstable jobs. (Dyson, 2006:8)

Part of the shame of New Orleans that cast doubt on political judgements was its predictability. In September 2004, just shy of one year before Hurricane Katrina, Jon Elliston published an article entitled ‘Disaster in the Making’. The article carefully details how within months of gaining the presidency, George W. Bush presided over the dismantling and privatisation of the FEMA. Critical programmes developed over years were dropped, the agency’s budget slashed and by 2004 FEMA had lost much of its capacity to fund mitigation projects. Meanwhile, following the 11 September 2001 attacks, the burden put on cash-strapped states to pay for anti-terrorism projects made them increasingly dependent on FEMA for help with disaster mitigation. But by 2004 the agency was forced to turn many away: