Typhoon Ketsana and Normative Pluralism in the Philippine Post-disaster Recovery System

Abstract

This chapter explained the post-disaster recovery (PDR) process in the Philippines under the Philippine Disaster Risk Reduction Act (PDRRMA) of 2010, the country’s primary disaster-management law enacted by the Philippine legislature after the devastating Tropical Storm Ketsana (locally known as Typhoon Ondoy) that left thousands of poor people homeless in 2009. Unlike the old disaster-management law, PDRRMA does not only reorganize the country’s disaster-management system but also adopt a more proactive and holistic stance to disaster management by incorporating, for the first time, some legal provisions on post-disaster recovery under the “build back better” (BBB) principle that requires adequate housing and relocation to disaster victims. However, this legal development did not assure a rule-based implementation of the PDR of typhoon victims in terms of housing and relocation. Using the sociological and normative pluralist perspectives, this chapter argued that the broad and brief provisions of PDRRMA on PDR allowed the influence of the plurality of state laws and regulations, as well as informal and cultural normative systems, to determine the outcome of the Typhoon Ketsana victims’ PDR, resulting in more negative unintended effects that intensified the suffering of the disaster victims.