Femke Mulder, & Kees Boersma. (2017). Linking up the last mile: how humanitarian power relations shape community e-resilience. In eds Aurélie Montarnal Matthieu Lauras Chihab Hanachi F. B. Tina Comes (Ed.), Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response And Management (pp. 715–725). Albi, France: Iscram.
Abstract: In this paper we present a qualitative, social network based, power analysis of relief and recovery efforts in the aftermath of the 2015 earthquakes in Nepal. We examine how the interplay between humanitarian power relations and e-resilience influenced communities' ability to respond to the destruction brought about by the disaster. We focus in particular on how power dynamics affect online spaces and interactions at the hyper local level (or 'the last mile'). We explain how civic technology initiatives are affected by these power relationships and show how their efforts may reinforce social inequalities – or be sidelined – if power dynamics are not taken into consideration. However, on the basis of a case study based power analysis, we show that when civic technology initiatives do strategically engage with these dynamics, they have the potential to alter harmful power relations that limit community e-resilience.
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Hossein Baharmand, Kees Boersma, Kenny Meesters, Femke Mulder, & Jeroen Wolbers. (2016). A multidisciplinary perspective on supporting community disaster resilience in Nepal. In A. Tapia, P. Antunes, V.A. Bañuls, K. Moore, & J. Porto (Eds.), ISCRAM 2016 Conference Proceedings ? 13th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management. Rio de Janeiro, Brasil: Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
Abstract: Fostering community resilience in the aftermath of a disaster constitutes a significant challenge and requires an adequate understanding of the community?s specific capabilities and vulnerabilities. We carried out a field study in Nepal as a multi-disciplinary research team that explored how the humanitarian response enabled community resilience after the devastating earthquakes. We explored three elements of resilience: persistence, adaptability and transformability by zooming in and out between the local community and humanitarian organizations operating at the national level. Our combined insights from three disciplines, social sciences, information management and logistics, show that humanitarian organizations operating in Nepal still primarily aimed to (re)build community resilience ?from above? instead of enabling communities to strengthen their own resilience in a bottom up way. In this paper we contend that fostering an inclusive and networked response has the potential to strengthen the adaptive capacity of humanitarian organizations and community groups and boost local resilience.
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