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Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Social work > Charities & voluntary services
Critically examines the role of humanitarian aid and disaster
reconstruction Building Back Better in India: Development, NGOs,
and Artisanal Fishers after the 2004 Tsunami addresses the ways in
which natural disasters impact the strategies and priorities of
neoliberalizing states in the contemporary era. In the light of
growing scholarly and public concern over 'disaster capitalism' and
the tendency of states and powerful international financial
institutions to view disasters as 'opportunities' to 'build back
better,' Raja Swamy offers an ethnographically rich account of
post-disaster reconstruction, its contested aims, and the mixed
outcomes of state policy, humanitarian aid, and local resistance.
Using the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami as a case study, Swamy
investigates the planning and implementation of a reconstruction
process that sought to radically transform the geography of a
coastal district in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Drawing on an
ethnographic study conducted in Tamil Nadu's Nagapattinam District,
Swamy shows how and why the state-led, multilaterally financed, and
NGO-mediated reconstruction prioritized the displacement of coastal
fisher populations. Exploring the substantive differences shaping
NGO action, specifically in response to core political questions
affecting the well-being of their ostensible beneficiaries, this
account also centers the political agency of disaster survivors and
their allies among NGOs in contesting the meanings of recovery
while navigating the process of reconstruction. If humanitarian aid
brought together NGOs and fishers as givers and recipients of aid,
it also revealed in its workings competing and sometimes
contradictory assumptions, goals, interests, and strategies driving
the fraught historical relationship between artisanal fishers and
the state. Importantly, this research foregrounds the ambiguous
role of NGOs involved in the distribution of aid, as well as the
agency and strategic actions of the primary recipients of aid-the
fishers of Nagapattinam-as they struggled with a reconstruction
process that made receipt of the humanitarian gift of housing
conditional on the formal abandonment of all claims to the coast.
Building Back Better in India thus bridges scholarly concerns with
disasters, humanitarianism, and economic development with those
focused on power, agency, and resistance.
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