Rising from the Ashes: Development Strategies in Times of Disaster

Rating:
Summary: Meeting Emergency Needs with Long Term Interests in Mind
Review: Disaster strikes in a developing nation, and, if forces conspire, international attention, people and goods come rushing toward the suffering people and land. Too often, this attention is short-lived, lacking sustained follow up initiatives, providing goods and services that are not compatible with longer-term program and needs, and overshadowing local iniatives to meet the needs of the community.

Rising from the Ashes provides a good overview of such scenarios and the many complex challenges related to providing emergency assistance in a manner that supports the local community's capacities. The book is a very good introduction to anyone interested in the issues. While the book has been out for a number of years and the scenarios are now somewhat old, the basic lessons still apply. The book may be most interesting to those unfamiliar with such settings and issues or those with a moderate experience. One of the most successful aspects of the book is the short synopses of emergency aid situations from around the world, which are drawn from a series of case studies--the heart of the research of the book--from around the world. To the aid worker, community member or local government official, Mary Anderson and Peter Woodrow provide a useful set of recommendations (if often sometimes common sense) for approaches to emergency assistance that support local communities and that further development goals.

Rating:
Summary: essential reading for emerging fields
Review: Emerging fields focussed on vulnerability studies, adaptation and risk make this book an essential read for the development academic. The authors present a table for assessing capacities and vulnerability based on physical/infrastructural, social/organisational, and attitudinal/motivational capacities and vulnerabilities that I used in my doctoral field work. The ideas are presented in a clear manner. I recommend this book to everyone working in a developing country, because it conveys the following essential messages: (1) disasters are not natural; (2) disaster relief has traditionally contributed to increasing the vulnerability of the people who are being assisted; (3) solutions exist for providing sustainable assistance to vulnerable communities that will increase their resilience to future hazards.