Understanding disaster (in)justice: Spatializing the production of vulnerabilities of indigenous people in Taiwan

Abstract

Existing disaster studies scholarship tends to uncritically privilege official institutional responses to disasters over bottom-up, community-based reactions and adaptations in the longer term. Meanwhile, the state-recognized disasters mostly exclude socioeconomic and environmental contradictions that generate disasters by making people vulnerable in the first place. Discussion of disaster justice, then, is limited to the immediate state responses to understanding disasters as natural episodes, often incorporating distributive justice into its policy responses. A more spatialized understanding of disaster justice should move beyond these dual limitations-constraints in defining disasters as isolated episodes and in planning for recovery as only emergency responses-and pay attention to the socio-spatial production of risk. This approach would better attend to underlying societal vulnerabilities created through urbanization, in this case, of the indigenous peoples of Taiwan. A spatialized understanding of disaster justice guides this research to attend to both the reoccurring displacements of indigenous people from where their socioeconomic-ecological relations were embedded and the systematic production of risk that has been reinforced and exacerbated by inadequate land use planning. Based on a study of two indigenous groups in Southern Taiwan, Kucapungane and Makazayazaya, this paper explains disaster justice from the indigenous context wrought by multiple expropriations and displacements from the 1930s onwards. This paper plans to do two things: First, it will investigate bottom-up responses to a series of historical disaster-driven migration/ urbanization through theories of community resilience. Secondly, it will expand understanding of ''disasters'' by taking into account the state-led relocation projects as human-made disasters and examine how they have contributed to the vulnerability of the indigenous communities under climate change. It will contribute to a better understanding of disaster justice that overcomes the dual limitations and opens up opportunities for alternative research and practices.

Global Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples in Taiwan: A Critical Bibliometric Analysis and Review

“…After Morakot, many Indigenous communities in southern Taiwan were relocated to or resettled in new locations. Many scholars argued that these government policies were insensitive toward Indigenous cultures and historical vulnerabilities [29,[37][38][39][40]. Various Indigenous groups were relocated together; pre-existing villages to which Indigenous groups were resettled were not accustomed to Indigenous cultures; numerous households were ineligible for governmental housing; and resettled families were unable to continue their farming activities or sell their newly acquired homes [37,[41][42][43].…”

“…The procedural vulnerability concerns the relationships people have with power rather than with the environment [38]. Relocation after a climate disaster, for example, has often been labeled as a double disaster in Taiwan because it shifts Indigenous peoples from one vulnerable situation into another that may be worse [39]. In the health sciences, scholars focused on mental health, posttraumatic stress disorder, and depression among Indigenous peoples after Typhoon Morakot and other climate disasters [57,58].…”

“…The Rukai and Paiwan peoples were the most studied with 29 (26.1%) and 28 (25.2%) articles, respectively. These Indigenous groups were most heavily affected by Morakot and government relocation policies [29,39], so it should therefore not come as a surprise that they were the most investigated. The third and fourth most studied groups were the Tayal (17 articles; 15.3%) and the Bunun (14 articles; 12.6%) respectively.…”

“…Many articles shared the lessons learned from Taiwan after Typhoon Morakot in a variety of contexts, ranging from the highly descriptive or technical [36] to the very critical [65]. Generally, Taiwan's approach to disaster management is somewhat top-down [39]. This is why numerous scholars have argued for more culturally appropriate post-disaster recovery strategies within Indigenous contexts [28,42,43].…”

The politics of disaster vulnerability: Flooding, post-disaster interventions and water governance in Baltistan, Pakistan

“…In this paper, we investigate how disaster vulnerability intersects with the practice of power, interpreted here as the reproduction and contestation of social relations through daily decisions and practices. Over the past few decades, disaster research has increasingly highlighted the role of socio-political factors in contributing to disasters, which are interpreted not just as ‘natural’ events, but also as an outcome of societal processes and power relations (Huang, 2018; Wisner et al., 2003). There are increasing calls for a more sophisticated political understanding of the dynamics through which the practice of power produces vulnerability, and of how disasters in turn produce particular socio-political relations (Eriksen et al., 2015; Taylor, 2015; Williamson, 2018), a call echoed in a recent special issue of this journal (Collard et al., 2018).…”