island conversations
podcast series

Where is gender coming from in that space?

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Well, it's a lot. Gender intersects in terms of who participates in this foreign disaster assistance, in terms of whether this programming has gender equality framing to the local communities, and whether gender relations in terms of roles, in terms of interactions, and expectations come into play in terms of application, operationalization of foreign disaster and whether local governments and local communities, organizations are gendered in terms of leadership. The Philippines, in general, has a high gender equality index in the world, even in Asia, it's one of the highest in terms of Asia for gender equality index. So  is the women's participation in the labor force and economic sector, women's representation in politics, and the like. Only perhaps during the time of former president Duterte did the ranking of the Philippines slide down a bit, but overall, it still has a very good index for gender equality.

 

With that kind of understanding, is it gender when these activities are laid out in communities that have been impacted by disaster and whether there are donors or, let's say, international organizations set the tone for what kind of activities or what kind of programs occur in disasters, in post-disaster communities. That had not synced to me at that time, that [if] you're coming from outside, you're an international body, you are an international group, an external group. You try to partner with local organizations or local governments, but you already have your own agenda. You already have your own set ways. "Oh, we're coming in", you know, " to provide assistance, but this is the plan. This is the design". So that was a new finding for me because I never thought that that was a protocol or how the system works. Like, what's the input of the local people? Was there consultation with local people?

 

In the end, what I found out in some of those that I did talk to and others in terms of other island communities that were impacted by disaster that I went to in Tacloban City,  Bohol, in the Bantayan Island. So, in terms of other areas, it looks like international organizations or aid or aid work; disaster aid work is a matter of checkbox. It's a matter of checking the box for reporting. [...] when they do get foreign assistance in the local communities, the money, if you look at that a hundred percent, the money that really reached to the people is perhaps only a quarter, maybe about 20% or 25% or so of the whole pot of money aligned for foreign disaster aid. The majority of the funds are for operation, maintenance, or to pay for the staff that goes to the Philippines, that goes to the country, for them to stay in nice areas, nice hotels, transportation, and buy a car. It has introduced different ways of working because at the time after Super Typhoon Haiyan, when so many of these international organizations came in to rebuild, of course, they were paying a higher amount of wage to carpenters, plumbers, and construction workers. The local people cannot meet the rate that is being paid by international organizations. So it has created a different layer of inequities and different types of skilled labor that had more of a preferential treatment.

 

I found out so many things that may be are available in other reports. Still, one of my key findings, when I went on the field, was that the Philippines is one of the top five countries in the world at risk for disaster, particularly in natural, induced natural calamities and natural hazards because of the insufficiency, inability of local resources to respond to the calamity, to the destruction. Other countries are able to kind of rebuild because of the resources that they have. And I found out that even with that positioning of the Philippines and perhaps other islands, there's not much scholarship about them. So that inspired me to put my [findings] together in a book.

In 2013, I co-edited a book in collaboration with the local scholars in the Philippines who work on disasters. I provided a space for knowledge translation of local scholars who have perhaps [less] access to publications to include them in that co-edited book with my grad student on disasters in the Philippines before and after Haiyan. [...]  let's say 95% were scholars from the Philippines, and we have scholars from Australia, but they're also Filipinos. We have a scholar from Mexico working in the Philippines. Interestingly, there's a lot of work, but it doesn't actually appear in mainstream knowledge access as very few books or very few works done by local scholars come into that. So, my work in the Philippines in terms of disaster allows me to actually leverage my access and my position in Canada to work with the local scholars, as opposed to making the local scholars part of an appendix to my research report. They are collaborators; they are co-producers of knowledge. They understand the local context. They understand the situation, but what happens mostly is that this is what I see as a trend, is that when scholars based in Western countries, go to disaster zones, they produce a report. The people that they work with tend to be in an acknowledgment section, "thank you for this", but never really include them as co-equal in terms of producing that knowledge. And my work for that project allowed me to understand that because of my personal connections, and that I'm here in Canada, I could do that research.

Many of them are doing the research, but they need a way for us to work together. And that's in the Philippines. I see that many island communities have been impacted by disasters and may share a similar context. There are a number of local scholars working there in collaboration with local practitioners, but their work remains unacknowledged in the mainstream. So, that project, that edited book that we did, for me, puts the local voices into the mainstream Western source of knowledge. We have an opportunity to go, but the local scholars, the island scholars, they have very rich contributions. So we reach out to them and we partner with them. That was my approach. It gives me a different sense of, I don't know, that you have a different feeling when you look at it that way. Oh, I only have a piece of this. But when you look into the many ways that island communities are constantly ravaged and suffer from this, we don't provide that much opportunity.

 

Western communities are the primary consumers of islandness, extracting the exotism of islands as paradise as a way for them to unwind and do recreation for pleasure. Anywhere in the world, they make the islands a refuge to recharge so that they are able to function much better when they go back to Canada, Germany, or wherever. But the very challenges that make island people persist, and I think, sustain resilience in many ways, they don't pick up. So, one of the things that came to mind after my research was the waste, global waste. And I said global waste is everybody's business and everybody's concern. But why is it that local people tend to be harmed more by the waste of other people? A clear example is the Philippine Islands. And anyway, there's another story because of what happened when Canada dumped its waste in the Philippines, and then it's supposed to be for recycling. There are so many different events and so many things happening that the world, the Western world, does not know yet.

 

So I think for island scholars, this is an area for us that while we have an island as a case, or our connectedness to an island is clear, we need to situate, we need to understand that our situation is not our own making, that we are connected to the world, we're connected to the global systems, climate change, environment and militarism, securitization, that happens in the microcosm in an island. Perhaps my challenge to island scholars is so that we may understand the uniqueness and particularities of the island. But for us to actually grow the strength of an island perspective, we have to connect to the world. That inspires me in terms of teaching, research, and networking, so I'd like to network more with people who are genuinely connected to the place of scholarship. And the island, islandness is, for me, perfect. It provides you with so many fertile ideas to work on.

In Canada, for your research to be approved, you need a gender plus lens, they call it now equity, diversity, and inclusion perspective. So they have made it EDI. But when it was first set, they called it gender plus. So it's intersectionality, gender, and society. Now, they have made it more equitable, diverse, and inclusive to add indigenous contributions. So that's become standard in Canada. Like before,  it was an idea, and now everybody has to do it. [...] Although I'm not anymore a UNESCO chair because it's tied to my previous university, it allowed me to establish these connections with the feminist scholars on the islands, so [...] you're closer to the realities of your work, being with island studies.