Risking Resources, Reckoning Risk
Launch of the 2014 UP TWSC Public Lecture Series on Natural Disasters
I. Rationale
The Philippines is increasingly known, among other things, as the “world’s most disaster-hit country” and parallel to the surge in the occurrence and magnitude of natural disasters has been the clarion call for accountability: who can we turn to in a time of unprecedented risks? When one of the world’s most powerful storms made landfall in central Philippines, just weeks after a 7.2 magnitude earthquake hit an even bigger expanse of the same region, headlines of pork barrel scams did little to comfort the public of the miniscule funds left for disaster relief. Calamity-stricken residents have begun begging on the streets for food and women were reportedly forced into prostitution to fend for their families. In the midst of the scandal and the rubble emerges what seems to be the one saving grace: the unique Pinoy trait of resiliency sung in societal chorus, that “the Filipino spirit is waterproof and unbreakable.” Attempts to recover from the systemic loss of life and property—“Tabang Na” shirts, run for a cause events, including the adaptation of the charity anthem “We are the World”—served to invigorate the downtrodden Pinoys. We are survivors, not victims. Indeed, in the face of unprecedented risks, never has “Pinoy pride” been beamed more brightly. Such rhetoric suffuses the reality of magnified vulnerabilities in the country, lest it moves down several notches in the Happiness Index. The Pinoy smile in the face of adversities that gained world-wide admiration, remain plastered on our faces, immortalized in the good vibes Pinoy adaptation of Pharrell Williams’ “Happy.” Yet eight months after the Bohol earthquake and typhoon Yolanda struck central Philippines, the disaster-stricken areas—apparently unable to catch up with the rhetoric that was cast only too soon---languish in their recovery and rehabilitation. Portraits of Filipino communities run counter to metaphors of pride and imagined invincibility—“mga basang-sisiw” in soiled tent cities, drenched in their losses and lost causes. In the aftermath of large-scale disasters, the good-natured incantations grow louder as if to drown out the wailing of those in mourning, the clatter of pots and pans emptied of hope. What is more, Pinoy pride deflates when set against actual figures for disaster relief. The calamity fund, the primary resource for disaster relief, shares less than one percent of the national budget. Resources allocated consistently pale in comparison with the extent of damage to life and property caused by natural disasters. The calamity fund for 2014 has been set to P13 billion despite the P24 billion estimate of the damage caused by Typhoon Yolanda alone. Thus, in close scrutiny incantations of pride and resilience function in some ways as crutches—more appropriately stilts wobbling in the damage and debris.
In this view, the risk from natural disasters have revealed how Filipinos have been equipped with resources that are contingent at best—where given the corruption controversies of disaster relief, spaces can be opened up for other modes of recourse, and oppressive at worst—where resiliency has become a self-imposed burden of responsibility and accountability among Filipinos. How Pinoy pride has been fomented by societal institutions, can be described, in the words of sociologist Ulrich Beck as a form of “narrated attention”—where the parlance of resiliency ultimately detracts from, rather than allow for, a critical stance towards the zeitgeist of our time. Living in a time of unprecedented risks, can Filipinos find other practical and meaningful modes of recourse, aside from the bipolarity of disaster relief corruption and feel-good incantation?
The 2014 UP TWSC public lecture series aims to broaden the scope of what Ulrich Beck referred to as "narrated attention" on risk from natural disasters and serve as a platform for the various forms of resources, what can be inferred to as knowledge practices on the Philippine encounters of natural disasters. The public lecture series, following sociologist Piet Strydom, posits risk to be not simply as an “objective problem” that can be addressed by scientific and technical knowledge and bureaucratic and administrative processes. The contemporary phenomenon of risk can be considered as “a new discursive culture of perception, communication and collective attempts to identify, define and resolve an unprecedented problem turned into a public and political issue.” How collectivities and institutions creatively generate and strategically utilize symbolic and material resources for different ends, unwittingly blurring the line between the protection and loss of life and property, compels us to rethink resources that have been taken for granted, simply taken at face value, remain untapped, or simply forgotten. In a time when risk looms as the currency and its mediations the product put forward on the pretext of trust and accountability, there is a need to reflect on how these create, maintain, and transform knowledge practices, in anticipation of more frequent and stronger disaster threats. Risks from natural disasters served to encourage interiorization of the unique Pinoy trait of resiliency—a mode of self-regulation made manifest in Pinoy pride among Filipinos. However, the precarious present does not privilege specific forms of knowledge, as averred by risk theorists; but in fact invokes disparate and divergent rationality claims. The public lecture series thus aims to serve as a dais for what social scientists posit as “contradictory certainties” without privileging one discipline over the other but possibly towards their potential alignment to meaningfully reflect upon the precariousness we, as a country, are confronted with.
The public lecture series presents speakers from a multidisciplinarity of approaches in exploring attendant, taken for granted, and perhaps untapped knowledge practices arguably constitutive of the Philippine encounters of natural disasters: 1) mass media and the science of natural disasters, 2) local knowledges and sense-making of natural disasters, 3) crowdsourcing in the new media and natural disasters 4) policy and practice in post-disaster governance, and 5) history and legacy of natural disasters. Broadly, it asks the following questions: What is the role of the mass media in the intrinsic relationship of science communication and natural disasters? How do local knowledge practices inform the public’s practices and beliefs during natural disasters? With the Philippines recently tagged as “the world’s most sociable online race,” how does this impact on the country’s precarious status as “the world’s most disaster-hit country”? How does the Philippine government grapple with the requisite flexibilities and improvisations in a time of unprecedented risks? Finally, how does heritage function not solely as a physical penchant for the past but as a reminder of the staggering toll that natural disasters inflict on our history and identity? In broadening the discussion on how symbolic and material resources are paired up with unprecedented risks, there arises both the opportunity and the means for shared accountability in a country with limited resources and increasing vulnerability, where the government, as principal duty bearer, has chosen to merely scrimp and beg just to be able to secure its constituents.
II. Lectures
When Typhoon Yolanda struck central Philippines, the public
was steered in all directions in a tangle of terminologies. In the aftermath,
government agencies had great difficulties defending their accurate forecasts
over the lack of a clear explanation the public can understand. As a sign of
admission, the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services
Administration (PAGASA), the country’s weather agency, was quoted saying “more
could have been done in explaining to the public the magnitude and gravity of a
storm surge.” Malacañang was also quoted saying “perhaps [the government]
could've communicated the danger better….“[we could've said] tsunami-like
effect.” Be they warnings of a “storm surge” or a “tsunami,” the institutions
the public turns to during natural disasters, it seemed, failed to reach out to
an already wary and confused public. Accusations were hurled: If the people in
Samar and Leyte have been warned against a tsunami, more lives would probably
have been saved. The issue on semantics is not negligible, especially in times
of natural disasters—when words in fact do save lives, as averred by one
advocacy group on disaster risk management in the country. The surge in scale
and occurrence of unprecedented risk from natural disasters points to the
increasing importance of science communication, an emergent domain in the study
and practice of development communication in the country. Science communication
in the Philippines, according to former Dean of University of the Philippines Los
Baños College of Development Communication Dr. Maria Celeste H. Cadiz, proceeds
from the communication of scientific and technical information to a
“cognizant…cultural process.” In describing the phenomena of natural disasters,
science communication or the process of making science concepts popular and
more comprehensible to various people through different media is gradually
gaining currency and this is where the mass media comes to the fore as purveyor
of eye-witness accounts. This is indicative of the Department of Science and
Technology’s vision for science journalism in the country: “to popularize
science through mass media and identify ways to bridge the communication gap
between the scientists and the public.” The Center for Community Journalism and
Development in the Philippines, however, reveals a still inchoate field of
science communication in the country, particularly among the mass media: “low
awareness and understanding of disaster risk and climate change concepts,
plans, policies, programs and in some cases, even basic learning points such as
definition of terms“ are some of the factors that prevent the media from
practicing an effective science communication of natural disasters. A quick
Google search on the key words typhoon Yolanda would generate reports that
mostly focus on casualties, destruction of properties, and foreign aid or
donations. There are minimal reports on the science of the disaster and on why
and how such disasters occur. How can we intimate an effective science
communication of natural disasters in the country? What is the role of the mass
media in the intrinsic relationship of science communication and natural
disasters? How does the Philippine mass media situate itself as an active
player in science communication as the country continues to be beset by natural
disasters?
KEY QUESTIONS:
- What is science communication? What is the role of the mass media in the intrinsic relationship of science communication and natural disasters?
- How does the mass media situate itself as an active player in science communication and in reporting climate risks in particular? What is the current state of science journalism in the Philippines? Is there reluctance that science reporting will not sell to the public?
- How can we describe the relations and dynamics of science communication among scientists, journalists, and the public in the Philippines?
- How should "effective science communication" be conceptualized? Is it about increased public awareness? Or should it also aim for public engagement in disaster risk reduction and management? What ethical aspects should be considered by a science journalist?
- Is there such a thing as Filipino science communication or do we just adopt "international standards"? How do we factor in cultural context/specificities? What is the future of climate risk reporting in the Philippines?
The Filipinos are a people not unfamiliar with natural
disasters. Typhoons, landslides, floods, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions
have all been part of a history—mostly unwritten—that has informed traditional
knowledge on disasters. Concepts such as "masamang kutob" and
"pangitain" are used to make sense of natural disasters that abruptly
waste lives, lands, and livelihoods. However, lamentably sparse are local
scholarly scrutiny on these and similar concepts and practices that Filipinos
use to explain the suddenness and the large extent of devastation that natural
disasters leave in their wake. This may be in part attributable to the banality
of traditional knowledge in a contemporary reality defined by its faith in the
infallibility of science and technology and in its god of Progress. For
superstitions—"sabi ng mga matatanda"—are seen as remnants of a
primitive and dark past, populated by an ignorant and irrational people. A
study on religion, disaster, and colonial power pointed out that folk bent on
the supernatural during Spanish colonial rule has been perpetuated and
successfully utilized by colonial authorities as instruments of control—as
divine punishment for non-Christian practices or as seal of divine approval of
colonial rule when inflicted on “enemies,” i.e., Moros. On the other hand,
disaster anthropologists have alluded to traditional knowledge as "warning
signs" that people make use of to temper the potentially devastating
effects of disasters. Foreign media featured an anthropologist’s claim that
Indian aboriginal tribes’ oral traditions and folklore have kept their
communities safe after the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami in 2004.
Anthropology and disaster research, for over three decades, have consistently
underscored the community as disaster research's basic unit of analysis: "theories about disasters are
inherently theories about communities, that is community continuity and
change.” As anthropologists account for how disruption, brought about by
disasters, are dealt with by communities, “outsiders” such as the government
and international aid agencies also affect a traditional community’s social
fabric. Some have done more harm than good—upsetting, even further
marginalizing, “indigenous resilience systems” that have been developed over
generations. Other scholars, however, were not too keen on the so-called
increasing vulnerability of indigenous communities and argued that cultural
change in traditional societies is
coping. A case in point is when one anthropological study in northern Philippines
demonstrated that regularly experienced disasters actually normalize coping and
are integrated into people’s everyday lives. Is there any recognition of the
value of traditional knowledge practices’ possible contributions to making
sense of how societies perceive and cope with natural disasters? How have traditional
knowledge practices served as a form of warning system against natural
disasters? How do traditional knowledge practices inform the public’s practices
and beliefs?
KEY QUESTIONS:
1. How do traditional communities cope
as a collective? In what ways is the social fabric of a community rent and
reworked during and after a disaster?
2. How do Filipinos affected by natural
disasters come to terms with what has happened? What beliefs usually act as
crutches in disaster aftermaths? How do traditional knowledge practices inform
the public’s practices and beliefs?
3. How valuable has traditional
knowledge been in providing ample warning of natural disasters? How do people
reconcile such knowledge with warnings issued by state and media machineries?
Is it possible to clear a middle ground between traditional knowledge and
science communication? What has been the appreciation of aid efforts—both local
and international and governmental and nongovernmental—to people's traditional
practices of coping with the effects of disasters?
4. What is the current state of local
scholarship dealing with how Filipinos make sense of and cope with natural
disasters? How supportive have academic institutions, government bodies, and international
nongovernmental groups been to such efforts? Is there any recognition of the
value of its possible contributions to making sense of how societies perceive
and cope with natural disasters?
New media has been hailed as the “ultimate game changer” for
natural disasters. Declared as having made possible “a real first for
humanitarian response in the 21st century,” the new media, spanning social
networking sites, Web 2.0 platforms, and mobile applications, have been the
“go-to tools” in mapping out real-time information during natural disasters.
They provide a bird’s eye view on the unravelling of the disaster, directing
help to where it is needed in unprecedented fashion. The new media owes its
success to a time when “access to information is as important as access to food
and shelter,” as once argued by National Geographic Explorer Patrick Meier. In
the Philippines, Typhoon Pablo witnessed new media’s crisis mapping capabilities,
when the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
(OCHA) activated the Digital Humanitarian Network, a network of solutions teams
that monitored over tens of thousands of tweets in a span of ten hours during
the typhoon. From the “curated tweets,” the team produced a metadata containing
information on media type (photo or video), the type of damage, analysis of the
damage, GPS coordinates, date, as well as links to other media types. The
database was created and shared with OCHA Philippines in less than 24 hours.
The solutions teams attributed this to the rich “social media footprint” of
Filipinos and a similar grassroots “information-sharing” dynamics was seen more
recently during Typhoon Yolanda. While Facebook made possible a “donate button”
in its newsfeeds and Google launched “Person Finder,” netizens streamlined the
use of hashtags in Twitter for efficient online coordination of relief efforts
offline—and success stories have been remarkable. A Filipina doctor, who posted
a call for help during Typhoon Yolanda in a social networking website, received
donations amounting to £30,000 in less than 24 hours. There seems to be no
dispute to what the country can gain from what the new media makes possible in
terms of disaster prevention and relief. Yet the new media also has its share
of flak—”slacktivism,” where political engagement has been limited to a click
of a button arguably reducing its merit; “trolling,” where racist comments have
proliferated in the wake of natural disasters in an attempt to pull down
efforts to rise above the disaster; as well as “information overload,” where
netizens become saturated and rewired only to absorb not more than 140
characters of information. The backlash is they end up relying on other people
to act and leave it at that. The end result is a virtual community where
netizens find themselves “alone, together” in its “collective action and shared
responsibility.” With the Philippines tagged as “the world’s most disaster-hit
country,” and recently “the world’s most sociable online race,” how does this
impact on the country’s present precarity? Who are the amorphous mass of
Filipino netizens and how much of their real-time actions wield power, if at
all, before, during, and after natural disasters? How can we re-imagine
Philippine encounters of natural disasters with the future of new media?
KEY QUESTIONS:
1. What has been the role of new media
on disaster prevention and relief in the Philippines? Some have characterized
the new media as having revolutionized disaster response all over the world,
but to what extent is it the ultimate game changer in disaster prevention and
relief in a country with low internet penetration (35 percent of the total
population)?
2. With the Philippines recently tagged
as “the world’s most sociable online race,” how does this impact on the
country’s precarious status as “the world’s most disaster-hit country”?
3. Who are the amorphous mass of
Filipino netizens and how much of their real-time actions wield power, if at
all, before, during, and after natural disasters?
4. While the new media has been a
leverage with which netizens have demonstrated responsibility as a call for
accountability, how sustainable are these collective actions in the transitory
cycle of news feeds?
5. How can we re-imagine Philippines
encounters of natural disasters with the future of new media?
If Republic Act No. 10121, the Philippine Disaster Risk
Reduction and Management Act, is indicative of the role of the pure and applied
sciences in Philippine legislation, then the intersection of the scientific and
legal domains in the Philippines can best be described as tangential. In 2010,
RA 10121 superseded Presidential Decree No. 1566 as the controlling law on
disaster preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery in the Philippines.
Among the new law's provisions are definitions of disaster, risk, and related
terms, which had no antecedents in the previous law. Notably, most of these
definitions are taken virtually wholesale from the United Nations Office for
Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR), which is hinted at—as the said source is not
explicitly acknowledged—by section 2c of RA 10121: “[It shall be the policy of
the state to Incorporate] internationally accepted principles of disaster risk
management in the creation and implementation of national, regional and local
sustainable development and poverty reduction strategies, policies, plans and
budgets.” Even the Act’s short title reflects the state’s apparent desire to
adhere to the current international discourse on disasters and risk. However,
it seems that the legislators behind RA 10121 hardly went beyond designing a
law that features the apropos buzzwords and is line with other post-1987
legislation. The Local Government Code of 1991 set five percent of estimated
revenues from regular sources to serve as a local government unit’s (LGU)
calamity fund. RA 10121 hardly alters this by stating that the said percentage
is an LGU’s minimum “disaster risk reduction and management (DRRM) fund”
allocation. If the law is truly in line with UNISDR’s definitions of
disaster-related concepts—which highlight community specificity and grounded
assessments—why does it still mandate what appear to be merely arbitrary
allocations for DRRM funds? Why does it fail to order LGUs to empirically
determine the basis for disaster preparedness expenses? One can only wonder
what the LGUs affected by the twin catastrophes of 2013 would have done had
they been forced to base disaster-related expenditures on the studies of people
who utilized more robust and reliable indicators for disaster preparedness than
hearsay and watered-down memory. In view of increasing unprecedented risks from
natural disasters, and possibly the requisite flexibility in disaster policy
and governance, it is imperative to give thought to what LGUs will do moving
forward—will they pay more heed to the recommendations of disaster scientists
and scholars or will they trust that they will always get by on the kindness of
local and foreign donors and the resiliency of Filipinos?
KEY QUESTIONS:
1. In practice, have LGUs been utilizing
the leeway given by the law to adjust their annual budget for disaster-related
expenses? For example, since RA 10121 came into force, have typhoon-prone LGUs
been allocating more than five percent of their estimated revenues from regular
sources as DRRM funds?
2. Given that RA 10121 and related
issuances do not specify how disaster preparedness expenses should be
determined—at best providing non-exhaustive lists of what such expenses could
be—what bases have LGUs used for deciding, for example, that seemingly
interminable disaster readiness workshops should be prioritized over the
construction of sturdy evacuation centers?
3. If grounded assessments for disaster
preparedness purposes are not the norm, have LGUs relied more on
improvisational means of dealing with the aftermath of disasters? How can this
“new normal,” if at all, be described?
4. Is heavy reliance on a community’s
“inherent” capacity to adapt and be resilient in the face of, say, the
destruction wrought by a catastrophic typhoon a sustainable practice or can we
outline a new form of reflexivity among frontliners in the government during
natural disasters?
5. Moving forward, what can be done
after the sunset review of the new law?
Catastrophic calamities devastate not only the tangible
present but also the reminders of the fading past. When the heritage churches
of Bohol, among the oldest in Asia, crumbled in the 2013 earthquake, many
lamented the “national cultural treasures” having been reduced into rubble. The
churches, according to the National Committee on Culture and the Arts (NCCA),
“are artifacts of memory”—they “form ‘part of the soul of the community.’”
Similarly, when Yolanda’s wrath felled the statue of Carlos P. Romulo, one of
the seven bronze figures in the MacArthur Landing Memorial, in commemoration of
a key event in America’s effort during the Second World War to retake the
Philippines from Japanese occupation, the Metropolitan Manila Development
Authority (MMDA) immediately set to work its restoration. MMDA chair Francis
Tolentino averred that “By restoring this memorial, we hope to inspire the
Leyte people to rise again. Like General MacArthur declared, we shall
return." In the twin disasters of 2013, earthquakes tampered with
topography and disrupted the surefooted rhythm of local lives as these break
belfries of faith and bury to the ground a culture’s material achievements.
Floods and storm surges drowned bodies and reshaped the margins of habitable
earth as these submerged histories that anchor identities, inundated and broke
the tenuous link between generations and its heritage. Calamities are fires of
societal transformations that force the living to sift through and find value
in the ashes of what’s left, divine the past from the soot marks, and devise
new spaces of being and belonging from the razed ground. Spaces that both honor
society’s loss and pain are the very same spaces that herald society’s
unyielding quest for permanence and remembrance. Heritage needs not only be
conserved but reclaimed. Histories need not only be taught but rewritten and
retold. Songs and practices that perform the past in the present must be drawn
again from memories of minds muddled by the trauma of disasters. Despite the
country’s limited resources, heritage compelled the need to stand up to
unprecedented risks and rebuild the tangible and the intangible, epitomized by
“Task Force Heritage.” But between the hunger pangs of the survivors and the
elite’s penchant to preserve their very own legacy, is there a formulary of
prioritization to address in humane and timely manner the need of the body and
the need of the soul? Is there a point and value in giving up and just letting
nature take its course on the material legacies of the past?
KEY QUESTIONS:
1.
If heritage is only one of the means of accessing the past, why privilege
it over other ways, even in times of natural disasters? Or does seeing it the
subject of sudden and irreversible devastation creates a sense of urgency that
may not be totally justified? What are historical examples of such in the
country?
2.
Given the increasing vulnerability of the country from unprecedented
risks of natural disasters, has the government consistently looked out for the
preservation of its “natural cultural treasures”?
3.
Should it always be government institutions that must bear the onus of
securing heritage sites? Who are the other stakeholders at work, if any?
4.
Is there a point and value in giving up and just letting nature take its
course on the material legacies of the past?
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