CAREER: Assessing Long-Term Sociocultural Impacts in Disaster Recovery Efforts

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Recovery efforts following natural disasters are notoriously fraught with challenges. While recovery efforts are initially aided by large amounts of government and private contributions, appropriate assessment requires consideration of a range of variables that might influence the pace of recovery. This project explores what happens once the media attention has ebbed and aid organizations begin to leave the area. Do these disasters and the recovery efforts result in long-term sociocultural changes, and what are the implications for those changes on development and economic revitalization of these areas? As a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award, the project integrates research and training to more effectively reinforce the infrastructure necessary to conduct effective scientific research. Funds would support graduate students with scientific and methodological training, field experience, and support in completing their theses. Widely-disseminated results will help inform future humanitarian policy and practice, and would forge international scientific cooperation in area of disaster recovery. Mark Schiller of Northern Illinois University explores the question of what long term changes to local socio-cultural institutions remain following the end of an aid or development project. Haiti's 2010 earthquake was one of the world's deadliest disasters in recent memory. It also inspired one of the most generous international humanitarian responses ever attempted. Despite the continuing global recession, governments pledged over $10 billion and private citizens contributed over $3 billion. The proposed research will offer methodological insights into ethnographic evaluation of INGOs (international non-governmental organizations) in disaster recovery efforts. The proposed five-year research project uses a purposive sample of eight rural communities with differing presence of humanitarian and development INGOs before and after the earthquake. While the researcher conducts interviews with donor, state, and organizational representatives, a team of graduate students shares responsibilities for participant observation and interview methods on social indicators, including level of dependence, independent mobilization, spatial organization, and what the researcher has termed "civic infrastructure," noting evolution over time. The educational component includes a research methods seminar in Haiti and a two-week Field School training, held concurrently with an NGO Summer Institute at Northern Illinois University.