Disaster recovery in the western Pacific: scale, vulnerability, and traditional exchange practices

On April 2, 2007, a 6-m tsunami struck Ghizo Island in western Solomon Islands, destroying two villages on the southern coast and killing 13 people. Despite experiencing a similar impact from the tsunami, the communities had very different recoveries. This article examines how the recovery was influenced by Melanesian practices of reciprocal exchange, known contemporarily as the wantok system. Our results show that as reciprocal exchange was practiced at larger organizational scales (e.g., community, regional, national), it generated dynamic and countervailing sources of resilience and vulnerability by biasing the aid distributed to each community. This biased aid allocation tended to favor individuals and groups more heavily integrated into the social exchange networks along which much aid flowed. Importantly, connection to or exclusion from these networks differs depending on organizational scale. This process reveals the importance of scale and cross-scale dynamics during the disaster recovery process. To mitigate the vulnerability of Pacific Island communities, it is vital that we identify sources of vulnerability and resilience as they face increasingly frequent disasters and are drawn into and become more reliant on larger-scale systems of governance for their recovery.