Disaster relief fiascoes: Column

Ten years ago this Friday, a tsunami wiped away whole coastlines of Southeast Asia, leveling villages, uprooting millions and killing a quarter of a million people in its wake.

Aceh, at the northern tip of Indonesia's Sumatra Island, bore the brunt of the storm with over 170,000 dead. Nearly $7 billion of humanitarian assistance — both private donations and government funds — poured in, as did aid workers scrambling to help.

I was one of them. I remember a year after the disaster, roughly 70,000 people were still living in tattered tents. Land rights disputes delayed the construction of shelters. Aid agencies didn't coordinate, so some villages saw new houses sprouting, while others got zilch. Built at lightning speed, many houses were uninhabitable.

Former president Bill Clinton, who was the United Nations' special envoy for tsunami recovery, swung through town, talking up the need to build Aceh back better than it was before.

Since then, "build back better" has become the tagline of post-disaster recovery.

A success story?

Today, Aceh brandishes hundreds of thousands of new houses, shiny new schools and freshly paved roads. Development experts hail it as a recovery success story. Some go so far as to claim that the tsunami catapulted the formerly isolated province into modern development.

It's true that natural disasters can give people second chances to rebuild dilapidated infrastructure and even stimulate local economies. According to the Chinese government, the rebuilding effort after the 2008 earthquake in the Sichuan Province was a boon to local economic growth. In typhoon-struck Philippines, survivors of the November 2013 superstorm are starting small businesses using recovery grants.

But "build back better" has also served as a public relations campaign for international agencies, helping them counter criticisms that humanitarian aid is slow and inefficient. It allows them to link relief operations to long-term development. For donors, it's tempting to believe that things will go smoother the next time around. It's a way to attract more funds, even though what makes an organization good at providing emergency response doesn't make it qualified to build for the long term.

In fact, the tagline has never helped define a way forward. Because "better" means different things to different people, some argue that building back "safer" is a clearer goal.

At worst, the slogan casts disasters as an opportunity to turn things around, leading survivors to have unrealistic expectations about housing, services and jobs.

Dispelling a myth

No country is better off after a catastrophic disaster than if it didn't happen. It's a fallacy that post-disaster spending increases economic growth. It just shifts resources around.

In Haiti, the "build back better" fanfare has done little for the nearly 86,000 survivors who still live under tents since the 2010 earthquake killed at least 230,000 people. After about half of the $13 billion in public funds for recovery has been disbursed, the country is still in ruins.

In New York, the more humbly named Build It Back program assisting Superstorm Sandy survivors didn't start construction until nearly two years after the disaster. In New Orleans, nine years after the levees failed and the Federal Emergency Management Agency became a national punchline for bureaucratic ineptitude, the lowest-income survivors of Hurricane Katrina have yet to fully return to the city, as rebuilding continues.

Even in Aceh, a closer look belies the positive spin. The influx of foreign aid distorted the local economy and weakened social cohesion. Researchers from the Australian National University found that in 2012, eight years after the tsunami, livelihoods hadn't been restored and that up to 50% of villagers still scrambled for food. Most new houses, built in the quest for quantity over quality, remain vulnerable to earthquakes, according to Teddy Boen, a structural engineer with the World Seismic Safety Initiative in Jakarta.

Still, the slogan is not without merit. It can be an aspiration to remove vulnerabilities that existed before and add social services. It can help bring together grieving communities to look forward. But we'd be fooling ourselves to believe that when the first batch of humanitarian workers descends upon a disaster area, we'd know how to build back better.

In Aceh, all the international agencies have long left. In 2009, the government recovery agency declared its mission complete. But the recovery is not over. Ten years later, now is the time to build back better.

Katrin Park is a former U.N. staffer living in Seoul.

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