Abstract
Social capital is widely regarded as a key element in recovery from and resilience to disasters. Yet, little attention has been paid to the specificities of what supports or undermines remote rural communities' social capital in disasters. Here, we examine how bonding, bridging, and linking social capital operated after the 2015 earthquake in three remote Nepali communities of Sindhupalchok and Gorkha Districts, which have varying degrees of access to infrastructure, relief and recovery programmes. We draw on community-based qualitative research conducted in 2018 (including data from Participatory Videos, Focus Group Discussions and Key Informant Interviews) to show how different forms of social capital ‘matter’ more in different phases of recovery. Immediately after the earthquake, high levels of bonding and bridging social capital among residents reduced barriers to collective action and helped efforts to rescue and support affected individuals. This dissipated, however, once external relief arrived. Already-marginalised groups with low social capital of all types were less able to access relief items and funding for rebuilding compared with those of higher social status or with political links. Pre-existing socio-cultural inequalities, including those driven by weak bonding relationships in families, gender inequalities and the remoteness of villages, further undermined communities' social capital and their resilience to the earthquake. Disaster relief programmes should target women and the elderly to improve the resilience of marginalised communities to future disasters. For long-term resilience, disaster programmes should consider social capital in terms of power and pre-existing inequalities, so that linking capital would not just serve elite groups.
Highlights
Disasters cause substantial loss of life every year
Our findings are presented in relation to the three forms of social capital described in the first section of this paper and are arranged chronologically, given that we identified these three dimensions of time as key within the disaster response: 1) collective community rescue and relief efforts immediately after the earthquake; 2) exclusion of marginalised groups after the arrival of outside aid; and 3) social capital as useful in the rebuilding phase, but reinforcing inequalities
We found that the resilience of rural communities to di sasters is a more complex process than suggested in common policy discourse in Nepal and in much of the existing literature on social capital and disasters
Summary
Between 1994 and 2013, an average 68,000 people were killed and 218 million people were affected each year with the largest impact (80%) in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) [1]. The 2015 earthquake killed 8979 people, injured more than 22,000, and destroyed more than 800,000 houses, affecting close to a third of the population (8 million out of 28 million in total) [4]. The severity of the earthquake was rela tively uniform across mountain and hill districts, the poorest pop ulations in rural regions, who lived in houses built with mud and stone, suffered the most harm [2,3]. It is estimated that an additional 2.5 to 3.5% of the population (at least 700,000 people) fell below the poverty line as a result of the earthquake [4]
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