Meandering to Recovery : Post-Nargis Social Impacts Monitoring Ten Years After

Abstract

On May 2, 2008, Cyclone Nargis struck
 Myanmar’s Ayeyarwady Delta and swept across the region
 toward Yangon. By the time the storm had passed, it had
 killed over 140,000 people, tearing apart families,
 destroying homes, and shattering livelihoods. In the months
 and years following Nargis,communities, supported by the
 national and international aid community, worked to rebuild
 their lives and repair the devastation that the cyclone had
 caused. Homes were rebuilt, paddy field walls repaired, and
 new fishing boats purchased. However, even as the process of
 recovery inched forward, villagers have had to contend with
 new and diverse shocks and changes that have both enabled
 and slowed their efforts to rebuild. Among others, climate
 change has led to unpredictable weather, hampering
 livelihoods, while the migration boom to Yangon and
 elsewhere has provided economic opportunity even as it has
 altered the local social fabric. These more recent issues
 have had a complex inter-relationship with changes wrought
 by Nargis. As time has passed, they have become the primary
 concern of most villages studied by the social impacts
 monitoring (SIM) research. But the long-term effects of
 Nargis remain visible, combining with newer issues to create
 new challenges,exacerbate old problems, and, in some cases,
 even hasten the recovery process. By focusing on a panel of
 40 Nargis-affected villages across time, five rounds of SIM
 have been able to track how village life has changed both
 post-Nargis and, in more recent years, as villagers faced
 both new challenges and continued recovery from Nargis. This
 fifth round of SIM (SIM 5) provides a snapshot of village
 economic and social life in 2017 and analyzes change over
 more than nine years since Nargis. It assesses three main
 areas: (i) This focus area examines the conditions of
 livelihoods and the local socioeconomy in the context of
 Nargis’ destruction and the evolving context of the rural
 economy across Myanmar over the past five years. It looks at
 the three main livelihood groups (farmers, fishers, and
 landless laborers) and at key issues such as debt, land, and
 housing and local infrastructure; (ii) This area assesses
 how communities have dealt with both the long-term social
 upheaval caused by Nargis and the more recent (but no less
 dramatic) changes that have accompanied Myanmar’s political
 and economic transition; (iii) New to this round of SIM, the
 final analytical focus area identifies what recovery and
 resilience mean for households and communities in the
 Ayeyarwady Delta, what factors are most important in the
 recovery process and in building resilience, and to what
 extent villagers have had and have the capacity to develop
 both; SIM 5 placed particular emphasis on understanding
 change over time, both since 2013 (when the SIM 4 research
 was conducted) and prior to Cyclone Nargis. As much as
 possible, SIM 5 draws causal links between exogenous events
 (such as cyclones, other natural disasters, political
 change, and national economic development) and household and
 community actions.