Bringing the state back in to humanitarian crises response: Disaster governance and challenging collaborations in the 2015 Malawi flood response

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2019.101262Get rights and content

Abstract

Malawi is a disaster-prone country with a long history of flooding. Yet disaster response policies have been largely neglected and disaster risk reduction efforts are mostly donor-led. The 2015 floods showed that Malawi’s local and national state institutions struggled to respond adequately. To support the Malawi government, the United Nations implemented its cluster system to coordinate the collaborations between the state, humanitarian and nongovernmental organizations in the disaster response. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with relief intervention participants, we argue that a focus on the localization of aid without explicit attention to the affected state’s institutions is problematic in contexts characterized by limited state capacity and overall donor dependency.

Section snippets

Disasters and disaster responses in Malawi

According to the World Bank, Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world. Located in southern Africa, landlocked and having a largely agro-based, rain-fed economy, Malawi and its population are heavily affected by fluctuating weather conditions [11,12]. For instance, the International Monetary Fund predicted that 2.8 million Malawians were ‘at risk of food insecurity’ as a direct result of the 2015 floods [13]. Early 2016, a year after the floods, many people in the south survived on

Methodology

This paper is based on data gathered in three separate stages. The first stage was conducted by the first author and took place in the city of Blantyre, in Malawi's southern region, from February up to July 2015. The first author participated in distribution activities organized by individuals or small (often faith-based) organizations to come to the aid of flood affected people, both in urban and rural areas. Two displacement camps were visited, one of which regularly over the course of

Disaster governance: the UN OCHA cluster system

Before describing the experiences of people who worked within the UN OCHA cluster system, we need to better understand how the system is supposed to function. The UN OCHA cluster system is governed by guiding principles that were agreed upon in the General Assembly of the United Nations [7]; p. 44). The first of these is that the system never activates automatically when a disaster strikes: to respect state sovereignty, its activation ‘should be upon the request of individual countries’ [7].

The 2015 flood response in Malawi

A day after the floods on January 13th, 2015, the following statement appeared on UN OCHA's website reliefweb: ‘Following the Declaration of State of Disaster in areas affected by floods by His Excellency the President Prof. Arthur Peter Mutharika, the Government of the Republic of Malawi has activated the cluster system’.9

Discussion: localization, the state and disaster risk reduction

Disasters often strike in areas that are already disadvantaged [32,33]. This was also the case in Malawi, where the southern districts, the poorest areas of the country, were hit hardest. Although often conceptualized as poor, vulnerable or even passive victims, it is the people who live and work in these areas who possess a lot of knowledge and experience when it comes to dealing with disasters (see also [22]; unpublished PhD thesis). ‘People have a cultural assortment of knowledge, beliefs,

Conclusions

In this paper we have described the ways in which the UN OCHA cluster system functioned during the Malawi flood response in 2015. After presenting how the cluster system is designed to function in order to enhance communication, coordination and collaboration, we based ourselves on in-depth interviews with people who worked in the cluster system to demonstrate that its functioning in practice leaves much room for improvement. We highlighted several challenges that complicated the collaborations

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Conflicts of interest

None.

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented in the panel ‘Dealing with and preparing for Floods – conflicts, opportunities and challenges’, at the Third Northern European Conference on Emergency and Disaster Studies in March 2018 in Amsterdam.

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