Gathering 'Good' Qualitative Data in Local Communities Post Typhoon Yolanda: Power, Conversation and Negotiated Memory (Working Paper IV)

This working paper is the fourth in a series run by the ESRC/DFID funded project ‘Poverty Alleviation in the Wake of Typhoon Yolanda’. This project monitors the effectiveness of the Typhoon Yolanda relief efforts in the Philippines in relation to building sustainable routes out of poverty. The project focuses on urban population risk, vulnerability to disasters and resilience in the aftermath of shocks such as Typhoon Yolanda. The key themes of the project are vulnerability, risk and resilience in relation to disasters and pathways in and out of poverty. Our work investigates post-disaster reconstruction efforts, specifically within densely populated coastal urban areas. These communities are amongst the most at risk and yet least able to resurrect themselves after disasters. Impoverished communities are often constructed in hazardous locations that are vulnerable to disasters. The poor are exposed to a greater degree of environmental exposure than the rich and ‘poor people are experiencing more disasters than non-poor people’. A lack of land and resources, in states with varying degrees of wealth, dictates that the poor are most often located wherever they can find security of tenure, no matter how tenuous this might be, and where they can access material and social resources. Those living in coastal zones or other flood prone areas are most at risk from any climate-change induced severity such as storms or other extreme weather events.