Abstract
On April 2, 2007, a 6-m tsunami struck Ghizo Island in western Solomon Islands, destroying two villages on the southern coast and killing 13 people. Despite experiencing a similar impact from the tsunami, the communities had very different recoveries. This article examines how the recovery was influenced by Melanesian practices of reciprocal exchange, known contemporarily as the wantok system. Our results show that as reciprocal exchange was practiced at larger organizational scales (e.g., community, regional, national), it generated dynamic and countervailing sources of resilience and vulnerability by biasing the aid distributed to each community. This biased aid allocation tended to favor individuals and groups more heavily integrated into the social exchange networks along which much aid flowed. Importantly, connection to or exclusion from these networks differs depending on organizational scale. This process reveals the importance of scale and cross-scale dynamics during the disaster recovery process. To mitigate the vulnerability of Pacific Island communities, it is vital that we identify sources of vulnerability and resilience as they face increasingly frequent disasters and are drawn into and become more reliant on larger-scale systems of governance for their recovery.
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Notes
Ghizo refers to the island, while the town on the island is spelled Gizo.
Villager statements differ from government census data regarding the number of villages.
A number of households were established after the tsunami, and we excluded them from the survey.
At the national level, Parliament consists of 50 Members, elected every 4 years by the people within their respective constituencies. Members of Parliament then elect the Prime Minister, who in turn selects his cabinet members. The Prime Minister also appoints ministers, who are responsible for heading the 20 or so different ministries, such as the Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources, the Ministry of Home Affairs, and the Ministry of Finance and Treasury. At the local level, government is divided into 10 administrative regions, including the nine provinces (Central, Choiseul, Guadalcanal, Isabel, Makira-Ulawa, Malaita, Rennell and Bellona, Temotu, Western) and the capital, Honiara. Elected provincial officials and assemblies head each province, while Honiara is overseen by Honiara’s Town Council.
Pailongge proper is our own term used to distinguish the settlement area known as Pailongge from the broader region (composed of multiple settlements) also known as Pailongge.
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the National Science Foundation Human Dimensions and Social Dynamics Program (NSF Award # 0827022) and San Diego State University for their generous support. We wish to thank the Solomon Islands Government and the Western Provincial Government for permission to conduct field research. We are extremely grateful to our invaluable Solomon Island research assistants and hosts. We would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of this manuscript for their very helpful input.
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Schuermann, S., Lauer, M. Disaster recovery in the western Pacific: scale, vulnerability, and traditional exchange practices. Nat Hazards 84, 1287–1306 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-016-2486-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-016-2486-7