Social Capital, Sustainability and Natural Hazards in the Caribbean

Research Report

Dr Mark Pelling

University of Liverpool

January 2001

  1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY/KEY FINDINGS & OUTPUTS

1.1Building social organisation for vulnerability reduction.

Knowledge of local social organisation is key for interventions from external actors (both governmental and non-governmental). It is most often preferable to attach vulnerability reduction initiatives to the activities of established CBOs or NGOs. It is often difficult to mobilise groups around the theme of vulnerability reduction when threats are episodic. Forming new groups creates additional transactions (and real) costs for the community and external agents, and raises the question of group sustainability with groups liable to failure once external support is removed. However, when communities and community leadership are known to exclude social groups (women, youth, ethnic or religious minorities or supporters of political parties) it may be beneficial to create new groups to allow marginalised groups a voice and engage them in finding solutions to vulnerability.

1.2Constraints on local social organisation for vulnerability reduction

A number of constraints on local social organisation need to be considered to maximise opportunities for vulnerability reduction. First, community heterogeneity and internal competition needs to be overcome through consensus building without excluding marginal groups. Secondly, community organisers are often in competition with local party activists who undermine community identity and reinforce dependency on political clientalism. Thirdly, there was a tension in local organisations between the goals of equity and efficiency, leaders expressed a preference for efficiency which manifested as an abandonment or subversion of democratic models of organisation. Fourthly, the priorities of donors and NGOs/CBOs seldom converged in terms of sectoral concerns or the time-frames for projects, one response has been for NGOs/CBOs to generate their own income through community businesses placing market constraints of their activity and weakening their ability to work with the most marginalised of groups. Fifthly, socio-economic development was associated with the underdevelopment of community organisation and negative consequences for local adaptive potential contradicting the view that social capital accrues in parallel with other forms of capital. Sixthly, in the life-history of any community there are moments when support for community organisation will be at a peak and when interventions to support communal adaptation will be most likely to succeed, moments include the consolidation of squatter settlements, and reconstruction following a catastrophic disaster.

1.3Being gender conscious

Women are often the most active community members in informal and formal community organisation. However, most community organisations are led by men and few organisations explicitly seek to target women’s issues. Women were targeted in interventions because of their gendered roles in household (and by extension) community maintenance. Womens participation was, therefore, seen as a means to achieving community involvement rather than as a mechanisms for women’s empowerment. Women are often identified as having high vulnerability to environmental hazard and vulnerability reduction programmes need to consider women as a target as well as a tool for vulnerability reduction action.

1.4The relationship between vulnerability and adaptive potential.

Adaptive potential is composed of coping strategies, which alleviate the immediate causes of vulnerability and are set within an enabling environment, and institutional modifications, which seek to change the enabling environment itself to enhance coping. Where vulnerability is high, adaptive capacity is constrained by conflict and lack of co-operation between different sectors and actors within each sector. Grassroots organisation to reduce vulnerability is most likely to occur where vulnerability is high and visible and where there are no institutional constraints on building social capital up into social organisation. External interventions seeking to reduce vulnerability need to act on two levels: first, on fostering positive local social organisation to confront vulnerability; secondly, on supporting institutional frameworks in the city that will not constrain local social organisation.

1.5Scope for building partnerships with the private sector

The private sector is often limited to the role of a state contracted provider of basic services or infrastructures. However, scope for greater integration in vulnerability reduction through partnerships with civil society was observed. For example, through the generation and self-regulation of building codes and architectural quality standards and in setting aside TV, radio and printed press space for education on local vulnerability reduction initiatives. Civil society organisations offered technical input and oversight to guarantee good practice and private sector organisations contributed access to professional networks and to media space.

1.6Challenges for donors to developing adaptive potential

International donors emerged as political actors with great potential for stimulating institutional modification in the city. A number of challenges to donor interventions were identified: entrenched cultures of opposition between the public sector and civil society; a tendency amongst donors to ignore the public sector as a partner; the application of international donor agendas without a deep understanding of local political context; contemporary project management and assessment timeframes were too short and became a barrier to local innovation to enhance adaptive potential; a lack of support for local and regional networks which had proven useful as a means of facilitating the replication of good practice and local innovation and resisting dependency on donors.

1.7Policy change amongst user groups.

In Guyana, a vulnerability framework was adopted for the analysis of disaster impacts by Civil Defence, and a follow up study on human vulnerability to flooding in coastal Guyana is currently being undertaken by the Department of Geography of the University of Guyana. In Bridgetown, the action research methodology fed research directly into a review of NGO strategy for the amelioration of urban poverty conducted by PCW and the Ministry for Social Mobilisation. In Santo Domingo the community case study findings were adopted by IDDI and have been incorporated in their planning for UCOREBAM. Other impacts on users were less tangible. In each case study community group members and leaders were able to voice their views on community organisation and were able to reflect on their own positionality within institutional frameworks and the strategies that had, and could be taken to enhance adaptive potential locally and in the city as a whole.

2.BACKGROUND

2.1PREVIOUS RESEARCH

This project built on a GEC funded studentship (R00429524262), which showed social organisation to have been important in shaping patterns of vulnerability to environmental hazard in urban Guyana.

2.2THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

2.2.1Environmental Change and Urbanisation

The Caribbean region is threatened by increasing environmental hazard. This is linked to global climate change and local environmental degradation (Maul, 1993), and exacerbated by population growth and rapid urbanisation (Blaikie et al., 1994; IFRC/RC, 1998).

Potter (1995) estimated that in 2000, 64% of the total population of the Caribbean would be urban. Urbanisation contributes to losses from catastrophic disasters such as hurricanes as well as ‘everyday’ disasters associated with an unhealthy living environment (Hardoy, Mitlin and Satterthwaite, 1992; IFRC/RC, 1998). Here, they are referred to jointly as environmental hazards.

2.2.2Human Vulnerability and Adaptive Potential

Individuals and groups are vulnerable when they are unable to avoid or recover from environmental hazard. People’s health, wealth and livelihoods can be impaired. Vulnerability has physical and social components. Physical vulnerability refers to weaknesses in the structural fabric of the city, such as inappropriate standards for housing construction or the inequitable distribution of physical infrastructure. Physical vulnerability is an outcome of patterns of social vulnerability, an area of concern that has rarely been approached by urban planners, politicians or academics. Social vulnerability is shaped by peoples’ means of access to and mechanisms in the distribution of economic resources, political rights and social claims (Pelling, 1998a).

Capacity for vulnerability reduction within the city will be discussed using the term ‘adaptive potential’. Adaptive potential is comprised of two types of human response to environmental risk, which can be classified as coping strategies and institutional modification. Coping directly reduces the likelihood or negative impacts of a hazard event. Institutional modifications alter the institutional framework or enabling environment of a community or city and allow greater scope for coping mechanisms to take hold.

Coping and institutional modification can be further differentiated according to whether actions are purposeful (responding to stress produced by environmental hazards) or incidental (responding to background stress emanating from the political-economy of the city). Figure 1, shows examples of coping and institutional modification, both purposeful and incidental.

The categories in Figure 1 are not mutually exclusive. Integrated development policy is built on the premis that development should simultaneously support the immediate concerns of coping and of longer-term institutional modifications (Wratten, 1995).

Figure 1: Adaptive Potential
Coping Mechanism / Institutional Modification
Purposeful Adaptation
(environmental stress) / Retro-fit buildings to withstand hurricane or earthquake stress. / Form an NGO to manage community based garbage collection.
Incidental Adaptation
(background stress) / Maintain reciprocal relationships with relatives living overseas or with other community members. / Protest against corruption in city government.

2.2.3Urban Politics

Vulnerability must be historicised in shifting local, national and global contexts. Contemporary vulnerabilities and adaptive potential are products of the historical co-evolution of social with physical systems (Norgaard, 1994), and of ongoing relationships between political actors from the public sector, private sector and civil society. At the heart of political negotiation is the distribution of decision-making authority and power over the allocation of resources in the city. Whether negotiations are conducted in a climate of co-operation, competition or control is an outcome of cultural norms and institutional rules shaped by local histories of development (Robinson, Hewitt and Harriss, 2000).

Structural change that redistributes power in the city is needed to reduce vulnerability. Elite groups at the local, city and national levels are likely to resist changes they can not control. Resistance can be seen in institutional inertia and by the co-opting of non-governmental actors by political parties or the state (Desai, 1995; Adger, 1999; Pelling, 1999a). For resistance to be limited and for co-operation to be built, trust needs to be nurtured between different political actors, that in some cases may have historical relationships of conflict or competition. Trust needs to be built for partnerships to operate vertically (e.g., between community based organisations (CBOs), local NGOs and international NGOs) and horizontally in public-private partnerships and in communities so that adaptive potential can be maximised.

2.2.4Social Capital

Social capital is used to describe mechanisms of trust and collaboration (Putzel, 1997). The term is applied to both formal partnerships between collaborating political actors and to local bonds that facilitate community organisation. In the maintenance of local social capital, Moser (1999) argued that women play a disproportionately important role because of their gendered predisposition to share food, water, cooking or child care with other women. In marginalised and vulnerable communities social capital, like other forms of capital, may be under-developed or counter-developmental, associated with systems of patronage and criminal networks (Desai, 1995; Beall, 1997; Hyden, 1997). This suggests that the distribution of social capital within a city is likely to act to reinforce vulnerabilities based on economic exclusion and political marginalisation. However, it is argued here that social capital is present in vulnerable communities and that with a supportive institutional framework social capital can be transformed into social organisation to build adaptive potential.

The possibility of strengthening social capital by building it into constructive social organisation has been noted (Evans, 1996) and observed during the consolidation of informal settlements (Moser, 1996). In most cases this transition is likely to be catalysed by an actor external to the community, such as a governmental community development department or a developmental NGO. The responsiveness of individuals and communities to external interventions of this kind is critical if participatory development is to be positive in ameliorating social vulnerability and needs to be understood.

2.3HYPOTHESES

  • Urbanisation contributes to environmental hazard and human vulnerability.
  • There is scope for local actors to engage in coping strategies and institutional modification and so to reduce vulnerability in the city.
  • Social capital exists in vulnerable communities and can be built up to form social organisation to confront vulnerability.
  • Women play a key role in the transition of social capital into social organisation.
  • International donors can help in building social capital into useful social organisation.

3.OBJECTIVES

3.1OBJECTIVES

i. Evaluate institutional frameworks for citizen participation.

ii. Identify the limits of the comparative advantage of citizen agency.

4.METHOD

4.1THE STANDARD METHODOLOGY

Empirical data were gathered from three capital cities. Georgetown in Guyana, Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic and Bridgetown in Barbados share colonial histories and are exposed to potentially catastrophic as well as everyday environmental hazards. However, they differ markedly in their post-colonial political development and vulnerability (see table 2), which allowed an examination of the effect of differing political regime forms on citizen/state relations and adaptive potential.

Table 2: Case Studies

Georgetown
Guyana / Santo Domingo
Dominican Republic / Bridgetown
Barbados
Political Regime
Date of independence
Post-colonial political regime
First free and fare post-independence national election*
Status of civil society / 1966
One party ‘socialist’ state, racialised
1992
Repressed and undeveloped / 1844
Authoritarian, neo-patrimonial, right-wing
1996
Conflict with state but vibrant / 1967
Multi-party democracy
1971
Limited human capital, co-opted
Vulnerability Indicator
City population (1991)
Annual urban population growth rate
% of city population below the poverty line
UNDP National Human Development Index rank (1999) / 275,000
1.5%
29% (1994)
99 / 5,000,000
3.5%
38% (1997)
88 / 150,000
1.2%
8.7% (1997)
29
Hazard Indicator
Principal catastrophic hazard risk
Everyday hazard risk / Flooding (21 city floods 1990-1995)
High, decayed environmental infrastructure / Hurricanes and tropical storms (>50/100 years)
High, inadequate environmental infrastructure / Hurricanes and tropical storms (>5/100 years)
Low, adequate environmental infrastructure

*In the present period of democracy. Earlier periods included a free election in Guyana in 1967, in the Dominican Republic in the 1980s, and Barbados has had uninterrupted free elections since 1951.

Data summarised from Pelling (1998b, 1999b, 2000).

Adaptive potential first was studied at the city level to identify general processes, and secondly, through a community case study which allowed more detailed analysis of organisational capacity and institutional interrelationships. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected using a standard methodological approach (Table 3), but one which allowed iteration and was flexible enough to respond to the research priorities of each case study. Where cases of good practice were identified additional interviews were undertaken. This was the case in Bridgetown with the state’s Central Emergency Relief Organisation (CERO) and the NGO Pinelands Creative Workshop, and in Santo Domingo with the NGO the Asociación Dominicana de Mitigación de Desastres.

Figure 3: The standard methodology

Research Aim

/ Data Source(s) / Method(s) / Data Analysis
Describe historical co-evolution of environmental risk and human development.
Delineate institutional framework for urban governance.
Identify key actors from public sector, private sector and civil society with stakes in environmental risk management or the amelioration of vulnerability / Published and grey literature. Review of the press, 1995-1999. Key informants. / Literature review in UK and in the field. Semi-structured interviews with local academics/ commentators. / Iterative review of data. Allowing new findings to direct ongoing data searches.
Assess adaptive potential of city-wide institutional framework / Key informants / Semi-structured interviews and agency documentation from a sample of organisations / Discourse and text analysis.
Assess adaptive potential of case study community / Households and community leaders / Questionnaire survey of approx. 200 households plus semi-structured interviews with community leaders / Quantitative analysis by SPSS, qualitative analysis using discourse and text analysis.

Published academic and consultants work, internal documentation from government and civil society organisations and the press from up to 1995-1999 were initially reviewed. Semi-structured interviews with key informants and household questionnaire surveys were then conducted. Questionnaires were conducted by teams of 4 local women who received training in survey techniques and were involved in the piloting and final draft of the questionnaire. The questionnaires used closed questions and were formatted with sections on membership of formal community associations, perceived environmental and social problems, participation in informal social activities and social indicators. Qualitative data were analysed using textual analysis and quantitative data were analysed using SPSS.

Two types of semi-structured interviews were conducted in each city. Up to 5 interviews were used to supplement background data on urban governance and vulnerability. Interviews were held with local academics and international NGO officers identified from background reading and a snowball sample. These interviews were planned to obtain information on aspects of the national political regime, the perceived capacity of state, civil society and private sector actors to adapt to hazard and vulnerability and on the performance of the overall system of urban governance in combating poverty, inequality and vulnerability. A larger group of interviews was conducted with the directors of organisations in civil society, the private sector and public sector that were involved in vulnerability reduction, 40 interviews were conducted in Georgetown, 54 in Santo Domingo and 35 in Bridgetown. The interviews solicited information on the organisation’s history, management structure, aims, major works and projects completed and underway, sources of finance and mechanisms of transparency and relationships with other organisations from civil society, public or private sector or ‘the community’ of local households. Two directed snowball samples were used to identify respondents. First, a bottom-up sample, starting with CBOs in the community case study (see 3.2.2) and then contacting partners with which they had vertical links. Secondly, a top-down sample, starting with international donor agencies and then contacting NGOs with whom they had links and finally CBOs with whom the NGOs had links.