Building community resilience to recurrent flooding: Field experience from the 2012 Assam floods, India

Abstract

This chapter offers a diverse perspective on seasonal floods and provides an understanding of how communities and institutions respond, learn and recover from these disasters. In the case of recurring floods, learning and experience from previous floods and participation of different actors can help in understanding recovery processes informed from an environmental justice perspective. Focusing on Assam floods occurring in 2012 and 2013, this chapter investigates the inverse potential relationship between disaster resilience and environmental justice and uses interviews and participatory learning and action (PLA) tools to gather empirical data. It is seen that learning occurs in single loop: the communities build houses on raised plinths using local materials and purchase land for homesteads and farming collectively. The government policies on flood management, embankment construction and resettlement of riverine households were top-down that neither address local communities’ needs nor involve them in the planning and implementation. On the other hand, humanitarian response actions incorporate communities’ experiences and learn from their previous interventions, and adopt community participation approaches during recovery. However, critical analysis of the evidence shows that agencies-government or non-government organizations-do not address the underlying causes of erosion and flooding to design a comprehensive recovery programme, dovetailing with development interventions to address both short- and long-terms needs. Hence, this chapter concludes that structural measures for flood protection adversely impact social and environmental justice and can be complemented by cross-learning to understand inherent weaknesses in prevention and mitigation actions and by initiating participatory and collaborative efforts during recovery. Community resilience from an environmentally just perspective requires unpacking the uneven distribution of risks and capacities within communities, and not viewing them as homogenous entities.