Meandering to Recovery : Post-Nargis Social Impacts Monitoring Ten Years After
On May 2, 2008, Cyclone Nargis struck Myanmar’s Ayeyarwady Delta and swept across the region toward Yangon. By the time the storm had passed, it had killed over 140,000 people, tearing apart families, destroying homes, and shattering livelihoods. I...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Report |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2018
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/970811524649784589/Meandering-to-recovery-post-nargis-social-impacts-monitoring-ten-years-after http://hdl.handle.net/10986/29782 |
| Summary: | On May 2, 2008, Cyclone Nargis struck
Myanmar’s Ayeyarwady Delta and swept across the region
toward Yangon. By the time the storm had passed, it had
killed over 140,000 people, tearing apart families,
destroying homes, and shattering livelihoods. In the months
and years following Nargis,communities, supported by the
national and international aid community, worked to rebuild
their lives and repair the devastation that the cyclone had
caused. Homes were rebuilt, paddy field walls repaired, and
new fishing boats purchased. However, even as the process of
recovery inched forward, villagers have had to contend with
new and diverse shocks and changes that have both enabled
and slowed their efforts to rebuild. Among others, climate
change has led to unpredictable weather, hampering
livelihoods, while the migration boom to Yangon and
elsewhere has provided economic opportunity even as it has
altered the local social fabric. These more recent issues
have had a complex inter-relationship with changes wrought
by Nargis. As time has passed, they have become the primary
concern of most villages studied by the social impacts
monitoring (SIM) research. But the long-term effects of
Nargis remain visible, combining with newer issues to create
new challenges,exacerbate old problems, and, in some cases,
even hasten the recovery process. By focusing on a panel of
40 Nargis-affected villages across time, five rounds of SIM
have been able to track how village life has changed both
post-Nargis and, in more recent years, as villagers faced
both new challenges and continued recovery from Nargis. This
fifth round of SIM (SIM 5) provides a snapshot of village
economic and social life in 2017 and analyzes change over
more than nine years since Nargis. It assesses three main
areas: (i) This focus area examines the conditions of
livelihoods and the local socioeconomy in the context of
Nargis’ destruction and the evolving context of the rural
economy across Myanmar over the past five years. It looks at
the three main livelihood groups (farmers, fishers, and
landless laborers) and at key issues such as debt, land, and
housing and local infrastructure; (ii) This area assesses
how communities have dealt with both the long-term social
upheaval caused by Nargis and the more recent (but no less
dramatic) changes that have accompanied Myanmar’s political
and economic transition; (iii) New to this round of SIM, the
final analytical focus area identifies what recovery and
resilience mean for households and communities in the
Ayeyarwady Delta, what factors are most important in the
recovery process and in building resilience, and to what
extent villagers have had and have the capacity to develop
both; SIM 5 placed particular emphasis on understanding
change over time, both since 2013 (when the SIM 4 research
was conducted) and prior to Cyclone Nargis. As much as
possible, SIM 5 draws causal links between exogenous events
(such as cyclones, other natural disasters, political
change, and national economic development) and household and
community actions. |
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