The Unheeded Present and the Impossible Future: Temporalities of Relocation after Typhoon Haiyan

Abstract

Recovery plans were developed for both the Philippines and Tacloban City in particular. They framed Haiyan as a climate change emergency and sought to respond to future risks to the city and country. This focus on future recovery came at the expense of attention to the transitional needs of those worst affected by the Typhoon. International humanitarian organizations were co-opted into the government’s refusal of transitional assistance to Tacloban City shoreline residents. This was because they construed their mandate of apolitical assistance in a particular way. An alternative framing of emergency deployed by a local organisation produced a very different result. In order to respond to the range of temporal needs in post-disaster situations, humanitarian actors need to be cognizant of the range of epistemic frameworks available to them.