Posted on 23 February 2023
Guest blog by Manu Caddie, who works on sustainable land and water management via IP development by, for and with indigenous communities.
I have little experience of aid and disaster relief other than supporting a few groups in Nepal, Ethiopia, Iraq and Fiji over the years, and being on the Board of the Council for International Development (CID) for a couple of years. I really appreciated the opportunity with CID to learn about how aid and development works overseas from the perspective of New Zealand's International NGOs working in the world's hotspots.
What I said then and say again now is that we should apply a lot of the lessons learnt and wisdom from the Overseas Aid & Development (ODA) sector to domestic issues and community development.
As we face more 'natural' disasters as a result of anthropogenic climate change, we really need to apply similar learnings from global disaster relief, crisis intervention and sustainable development. Covid pandemic helped a little, with approaches used in previous pandemics in Asia, Africa and the Pacific employed successfully here in Aotearoa, but there's clearly a lot more to be learnt and applied in our domestic context.
Being a recipient of large scale aid, instead of a donor, is an interesting experience so far. Seeing how unprepared public services, let alone small isolated communities, are for responding to a disaster and the support that subsequently flows (or doesn't), is a real eye-opener. I'm sure there will be many debriefings, reflections and rearranging of systems.
I have only admiration for the public servants and community kaimahi who have been working around the clock for six weeks now to prepare for, monitor and respond to needs across affected regions. The impacts of Hale, Gabrielle and the rains across Tāmaki and Hauraki will be felt for a long time, and who knows what else is around the corner. Hopefully it inspires a new generation of young people to train as emergency responders, sustainability advocates, environmental scientists, post-growth economists and resilience engineers.
I'd like to hear more from experienced ODA workers who have thought long and hard about the ethics of aid, best practice in community development, disaster preparedness and response coordination.
There's good aid and bad aid - most of us clearly don't understand the difference yet (I'm guessing a truckload of ice cream delivered to a disaster zone is not on the good side of the ledger), let alone having systems in place to provide good aid in domestic disaster situations. Sentiment, empathy and emotion are important, human responses, we definitely need those, but we also need rational, considered and well-prepared responses or we can end up creating more short-term and long-term problems in the worst affected communities.
Again, thank you to everyone who has responded - both on the ground and from afar - it is deeply appreciated and we will all need to 'build back better'.
Manu Caddie at Te Puia Springs with Civil Defence officers, dropping off generators and Starlinks, following Cyclone Gabrielle