Indian Ocean Tsunami, 2004

Abstract

AbstractChapter 7 examines the international humanitarian response to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, with particular attention to the two worst-affected countries—Indonesia and Sri Lanka. The tsunami was one of the deadliest natural disasters in living memory, and the response from the global public was unprecedented, with many humanitarian agencies receiving more funding than they knew how to spend. The huge amounts of funding were matched by huge numbers of organizations and relief workers arriving in the affected countries, although the need for such a large-scale international response was not self-evident nor grounded in needs assessment. Instead, it reflected preconceptions among international aid agencies and media about humanitarian needs and local capacity and overestimated both the need for emergency assistance and the ability of humanitarian agencies to go beyond that to recovery and rehabilitation. There was a rapid transition from relief to recovery and rehabilitation, which was widely seen as the right thing in principle but as not working so well in practice, raising questions about whether humanitarian agencies are the right actors beyond emergency response. Promises to ‘build back better’ (BBB) went mostly unfulfilled, with replacement assets sometimes poorly targeted and not always appropriate for local conditions, and recovery efforts overall following a technocratic approach which was insensitive to the wider social and economic context and risked exacerbating inequality, poverty, and conflict.