Do Developed Countries Learn DRR from Developing Countries?

Abstract

The international community’s strategy to assist Nepal in recovering from the 2015 Nepal Gorkha earthquake will be considered from a disaster educational perspective. In the first half of the chapter, the importance of ‘unfixing’ the relationship between experts on DRR and lay people will first be discussed since this relationship provides a platform for the conventional idea of disaster education, that is, knowledge transmission from experts to lay people. In order to unfix the relationship regarding disaster education, the possibility of mutual communication in the recovery process of the 2015 Nepal Gorkha Earthquake will be discussed. In particular, we attempted to discover the perceptions and indigenous knowledge of those affected local people in Nepal as transferring knowledge from those who are not supposed to have scientific knowledge is an important part of mutual communication. Based on a series of interviews, as of 2019, it is difficult to clearly point out what are the local knowledge or skills. However, it is possible to propose a hypothesis that there have been rules of thumb that have emerged in the recovery process that have guided the survivors in their efforts to recover from the disaster.