See Kevin Grove's most recent contributions to Society & Space: Agency, Affect, and the Immunological Politics of Disaster Resilience, Security beyond resilience, Biopolitics, Biopower, and the Return of Sovereignty, and Assemblage, transversality and participation in the neoliberal university

As if on cue, the sun powered through the afternoon rainclouds. The camera crew quickly set up their equipment on the narrow footbridge. The community leader they were interviewing – a Rastafarian involved in a variety of disaster management and development activities in Trinityville, Jamaica – directed them to the best angle to capture a particularly hazardous bend in a river. With the perfect perspective set, the interview commenced. Trinityville is a collection of small communities in the southern foothills of the Blue Mountains. We were there to film footage for a community disaster plan we had been preparing. The plan was part of the Building Disaster Resilient Communities project, or BDRC, funded through the Canadian International Development Agency and implemented by Jamaica’s national disaster management agency, ODPEM (the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management). This interview was intended to focus on the river and the flood risks it posed to the community. It went smoothly at first. The Rastafarian described how runoff from heavy rains in the mountains filled the river so quickly that people could hear the flood wave barreling down the mountainside towards their villages, and how the flash floods would cover the footbridge, leaving people stranded with no access to the town’s only road.

But then he began going off script. With sunlight glaring off his microphone, he pleaded the case for the state to permit community members to dredge the river and sell the stone to nearby industries. People were suffering, he argued, and this would provide the region with some much-needed economic resources. Needless to say, the interview shut down quickly after that. One of the project officers turned away and said, ‘well, we’ll have to edit that last part out. Dredging the river would increase flood risk.’

This brief scene offers a clear example of the biopolitical stakes involved in community-based disaster resilience programming. It suggests that the problem confronting state agents such as my colleagues in ODPEM is not local peoples’ lack of adaptive capacity, but rather its excess: each day local people live, and intimately know, their vulnerabilities and insecurities; they also recognize them quite rightly as effects of four hundred years of slavery, colonialism, bourgeoisie nationalism, and neoliberal structural adjustement. The banal violence, abandonment, and suffering in places like Trinityville far exceed the narrow sense of environmental vulnerabilities disaster resilience targets. Likewise, the adaptability that comprises life lived as what Achille Mbembe calls a ‘subject of the present’ – a subject immersed in the immediate, immanent confluence of multiple historical trajectories, a subject who seizes the present as potential opportunities in an ongoing contest for survival against the odds – is a much more raw and potentially radical form of adaptability than the adaptive capacities resilience purports to build. This is evident in the Rastafarian’s advocacy for a different kind of resilience – a resilience not based on social and ecological systemic security, but rather on addressing the political economic suffering affecting his neighbors’ daily lives. While this would certainly increase flood risk for the community, it also signals a creative and subversive seizing of the moment, which points to the persistent possibility of other possible socio-ecological futures. To be sure, such isolated efforts are often futile, but like sunlight radiating off leaves, rooftops, and microphone, this excess saturates the present with a beatified aura.

The challenge confronting ODPEM in this instance was less to develop adaptive capacities than tolimit them, to de-territorialize them from their contextualized socio-spatial moorings and re-territorialize them in affective registers and epistemic categories of Western disaster management. This photo essay explores the de- and re-territorializations of socio-ecological insecurity enacted through the BDRC. The images here are my own, all taken during my work on the BDRC in Trinityville, where I assisted ODPEM’s Projects Division with the project’s implementation as part of my research on development and disaster management. Most were taken during two transect walks conducted to gather local knowledge on hazards, vulnerabilities, and capacities that could be included in the community disaster plan. A few were included in a slideshow presented to the community at the plan’s launch. In that sense, the photos here are literally how the state sees resilience in Trinityville: they represent the places, things, and people respondents pointed out during our interviews. As such, they offer a window on how the state segments and categories socio-ecological life in ways that make it amenable to government through disaster resilience programming. However, my hope is that recontextualizing these images might work against this biopolitical reduction, and signal points where resilience fails to capture this life.

“What impacts have hazards had on you community?”

During our transect walks, many respondents to this initial question listed the elderly woman’s house in Somerset buried under a recent landslide. We heard her story firsthand a few weeks later, when we captured her account in order to include it in a video for Trinityville’s community disaster plan. She told the film crews how the sound of earth and debris crashing down the hillside startled her out of a sleep in the early morning hours. The remains of her house provided striking footage. Splintered boards and rusted zinc sheets protruded out of the earth, and the green hillside above still bore a brown scar from the perilous morning. Thankfully, she awoke just in time to run across the road to the safety of her neighbor’s driveway. She lost her house and all her possessions, but still counted herself as lucky: family and neighbors offered her a place to stay, clothing, and food, saving her from the indignity of searching for shelter and supplies.

Starting transect walk interviews with questions focusing on the local history of disasters frames our conversations in terms of environmental insecurities, danger, and fear. Along with the elderly woman’s home, another frequent response was the deacon’s home. The remains – a foundation and a few steps – still stand by the riverbank. The rest of the home, with the deacon inside, was washed away in a then-recent flood event. Recounting these losses drives home how the environment should be understood as an unpredictable source of danger, something to be feared.

A more humorous hazard impact was the outcome of ‘the competition’. Two neighbors began extending their homes along the riverbank, competing to see who could build the biggest house. The house pictured on the right nearly won, if not for nature’s emasculating intervention: just after adding a new story to charge ahead, a flood washed away the structure’s foundation, and the homeowner’s pride. For many respondents, the competition signaled the danger of hubris, showmanship and competition run amok. The house conveyed a lesson on the need to treat nature with respect and not push its limits. Because it tied together values such as competitiveness, masculinity, bravado, and one-upmanship, the ruins gave ODPEM a visible sign of bad cultural practices increasing disaster risk.

“What are some hazardous areas in your community?”

While our interviews attempted to cast nature as a source of insecurity to be feared and respected, what one interviewee referred to as ‘little cultural practices’ compounded this danger. Gullies were frequently mentioned as a source of flooding and, in some cases, landslides. Gullies were certainly the location of the problem, but the origin, for the state, lay elsewhere: in routine practices such as littering. Community leaders took us to gullies filled with empty bag juice bags, soda cans and bottles, even rusted-out car frames. Filled with litter like this, gullies would back up during storms and flood the surrounding areas. Littering was a key problem identified through our transect walks, not only because it was visually the immediate source of the problem, but also because it gave the state a tangible surface on which it could exercise governmental control. ‘Not littering’ was a simple activity in which everyone could engage in order to reduce the community’s flood risk.

“How do you know a storm is coming?”

While some cultural practices such as littering, not properly harnessing zinc roofs, or building too big next to the river could increase danger, other cultural practices could lessen this danger. A key part of transect walks was to capture and integrate local knowledge on hazards with more technical disaster management knowledge in the community plan. Many respondents noted that trumpet trees, pictured above, would turn their leaves upright as a storm approached.

“What development agencies have you worked with in the past?”

Of course, ODPEM was not the only state and NGO agency working in Trinityville. Near the elderly woman’s home destroyed by the landslide, discussed above, bulldozers, backhoes, and dump trucks sat idly by. A billboard posted nearby declared that they were part of an ongoing EU and Christian Aid funded project to promote sustainable development and disaster risk reduction. The project involved clearing loose trees from the hillside and replacing them with banana trees, in order to prevent soil slippage and offer new economic opportunities. A parade of development agencies is part of daily life in Trinityville: most respondents would rattle off a list of nearly a dozen agencies that they had interacted with in recent years. When asked to rank each one on a scale of 1 to 10, the highest marks always went to the agencies that provided resources, such as chickens, with little demanded in return, such as attendance at educational events or other participatory activities.

“Do you know anyone who can…”

Since the 2005 Hyogo Framework, a key policy goal for disaster resilience programming has been constructing cultures of safety. In practice, this involves social and cultural engineering designed to work on the relations between community members. After discussing the local history of disasters and current hazards, the interviews would then turn to identifying people with specific capacities: who has first aid training? Who has a chainsaw to clear blocked roads? Who has medical training to assist pregnant women during disaster? Who are local shopkeepers who can extend lines of credit before relief aid can arrive? Who has a large house that can be used for shelter? These questions served two purposes: if the respondent knew people with these capacities we were unaware of, we would make a note and contact that person later to see if they would be included in the community disaster plan. If the respondents didn’t know anyone with these capacities, we would then inform them of everyone in the community who had attended various training courses led by ODPEM and its partner agencies, such as search and rescue and CPR training offered by the Jamaica Red Cross and the Jamaica Fire Brigade.

Following our transect walks, and in consultation with community leaders and volunteers, we then held a launch party for the completed disaster plan. Held in a local school, the event featured speeches from directors of national agencies working on the plan, such as ODPEM, musical performances, refreshments, and a power point presentation of the plan. Taken together, the transect walks, interviews, educational sessions. As the image suggests, turnout for the Trinityville plan was strong – although many noted the absence of the community’s youth from the event. This discouraged some community leaders, who had hoped the disaster planning process would give the so-called ‘idle youth’ a reason to get off the streets and porches and get involved in community affairs.

Taken together, this brief account of a small part of the community disaster planning process helps us draw out the machinic qualities of community-based disaster resilience. Essentially, the transect walks, interviews, educational sessions, consultations, and launch party attempt to reconfigure the relations people have with each other, and their surroundings. As I’ve documented in articles in this journal and elsewhere, community-based disaster resilience targets the affective relations that give people and environments adaptive capacity. They attempt to produce resilient individuals and communities by constructing so-called ‘cultures of safety’. However, in practice, they re-territorialize affective relations through the categories of disaster management planning and practice. For example, vulnerability, a condition that embodies uneven political economic, race, and gender relations, and multiple intersecting historical trajectories that contextualize these relations, becomes in the community disaster plan a problem of exposure to unpredictable nature. It can be managed by becoming resilient: by changing cultural and behavioural practices, by utilizing local knowledge, and by relating to others as potential resources that can be drawn on during the event of disaster.

This is a key machinic effect of community-based resilience: it seeks to create an adaptation machine of sorts, the community as a self-organizing system that will autonomously respond to disasters in ‘proper’ ways – i.e., ways that do not challenge the existing order of things. A community that maintains health by relying on trained individuals for immediate medical aid. A community that maintains mobility by relying on neighbors with access to chainsaws. A community that maintains sustenance by relying on local shopkeepers who extend credit to others in need. In short, a community that can subsist on the threshold of disaster without the need for state intervention to maintain order.

Caribbean subaltern studies scholars read Jamaica’s political economic history as a four-hundred year assault on the radical freedom, creativity, and productive potential of African peoples. Slavery, the plantation system, bourgeoisie nationalism and the country’s two-party clientelist politics, the formation of garrison districts in Kingston, structural adjustment, and now resilience all seek, in more or less physically violent ways, to be sure, to corral, channel, and direct marginalized black populations’ constituent power. In its latest iteration, the counter-revolution has largely reduced this power to a kind of arbitrage for daily survival, what a Trinityville community leader described as ‘turning hand to make fashion’: finding creative ways to get by in a harsh neoliberal order stacked against your survival and dignity. Expressions of this power often take a-political forms, such as some community members working with a development agency to create, produce, and nationally market a locally popular guava ketchup sauce, or the Rastafarian’s plea on the bridge to allow the community to dredge the river. But this power, and its potential, persists nonetheless. The Christian church pictured above is, in my reading, another expression of this constituent power. The main congregation hall at the rear of the building was washed away in a flood; the skeletal remains of the roof hang off the building’s back. Members reinforced the remaining half of the building and continue to use it for worship and congregation. This is, of course, an expression of Trinityville’s abandonment: on the verge of collapse, one major flood away from destruction. But it is also an expression of vitality: the potential to make life out of, through, and perhaps even against the physical and economic violence of abandonment. The point here is not to celebrate suffering and poverty, to somehow celebrate hardship as a liberatory condition. Instead, it is to recognize that this constitutive power, the affective potential to produce life, persists in spite of the counter-revolution’s best efforts. We can be assured it persists because it is what state resilience fears: the potential, no matter how circumscribed, for other kinds of adaptations, for other kinds of resilience not based on securing systemic meta-stability. Just as religion has always been a vehicle for both control and anti-colonial and anti-racist organization, so too might resilience offer the potential for producing both reactionaryand more radical socio-ecological futures. The challenge is to de-territorialize experiences of socio-ecological insecurity from the categories of systems thinking and state science that constrain their affective potential.