Post disaster social capital: trust equity, bayanihan and Typhoon Yolanda

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of disaster rehabilitation interventions on bonding social capital in the aftermath of Typhoon Yolanda. Design/methodology/approach: The data from the project is drawn from eight barangays in Tacloban City, the Philippines. Local residents and politicians were surveyed and interviewed to examine perceptions of resilience and community self-help. Findings: The evidence shows that haphazard or inequitable distribution of relief goods and services generated discontent within communities. However, whilst perceptions of community cooperation and self-help are relatively low, perceptions of resilience are relatively high. Research limitations/implications: This research was conducted in urban communities after a sudden large-scale disaster. The findings are not necessarily applicable in the rural context or in relation to slow onset disasters. Practical implications: Relief agencies should think more carefully about the social impact of the distribution of relief goods and services. Inequality can undermine community level cooperation. Social implications: A better consideration of social as well as material capital in the aftermath of disaster could help community self-help, resilience and positive adaptation. Originality/value: This study draws on evidence from local communities to contradict the overarching rhetoric of resilience in the aftermath of Typhoon Yolanda

Gathering 'Good' Qualitative Data in Local Communities Post Typhoon Yolanda: Power, Conversation and Negotiated Memory (Working Paper IV)

This working paper is the fourth in a series run by the ESRC/DFID funded project ‘Poverty Alleviation in the Wake of Typhoon Yolanda’. This project monitors the effectiveness of the Typhoon Yolanda relief efforts in the Philippines in relation to building sustainable routes out of poverty. The project focuses on urban population risk, vulnerability to disasters and resilience in the aftermath of shocks such as Typhoon Yolanda. The key themes of the project are vulnerability, risk and resilience in relation to disasters and pathways in and out of poverty. Our work investigates post-disaster reconstruction efforts, specifically within densely populated coastal urban areas. These communities are amongst the most at risk and yet least able to resurrect themselves after disasters. Impoverished communities are often constructed in hazardous locations that are vulnerable to disasters. The poor are exposed to a greater degree of environmental exposure than the rich and ‘poor people are experiencing more disasters than non-poor people’. A lack of land and resources, in states with varying degrees of wealth, dictates that the poor are most often located wherever they can find security of tenure, no matter how tenuous this might be, and where they can access material and social resources. Those living in coastal zones or other flood prone areas are most at risk from any climate-change induced severity such as storms or other extreme weather events.ESRC-DFI

Counter-terrorism, smart power and the United States

This article examines smart power, specifically in relation to US counter-terrorism initiatives, focusing on US foreign aid as a soft power instrument. Economic aid and military aid are disbursed under the auspices of USAID and the military is tasked with soft and hard power strategies that have proven problematic to manage as ‘an integrated grand strategy’. Identifying variables that accurately indicate the success or otherwise of smart power as a counter-terror strategy is problematic. Nevertheless a tentative correlation can be drawn between high levels of US aid and low levels of trust in the US in frontline Islamic states. This has led to slippage between hard and soft power and un-smart policy. Consequently a gap has emerged between what the US hopes that the international community will respond to in terms of smart power as a counter-terror initiative and what actually happens. The US has tended to revert to hard power tools in the face of this gap. I argue that foreign aid must not only be soft but ‘sticky’ in order for smart power strategies to succeed

Evolving social capital and networks in the post‐disaster rebuilding process: the case of Typhoon Yolanda

Typhoon Yolanda brought major devastation to the local communities and infrastructure and also reshaped social structures and networks in the Philippines. During the immediate recovery process, bridging, bonding and linking social capital have had differential impacts and outcomes on how communities cope with the aftermath of the disaster. This paper investigates the interplay between the various types of social capital and their contributions to immediate coping strategies of Typhoon Yolanda communities. This paper also evaluates the complexity of defining social capital in a disaster context. In particular, it unpacks the blurring of the bridging and linking social capital at the immediate stage of rehabilitation in a post disaster context and its impacts on the social fabric of the communities. We deduce from this case study the social capital strategies necessary for a speedy recovery process both economically and socially for disaster-affected communities

Poverty Alleviation in the Wake of Typhoon Yolanda Workshop Findings: Working Paper I

The following observations are drawn from the opening workshop of the ESRC/DFID funded project (Ref: ES/M008932/1), ‘Poverty Alleviation in the Wake of Typhoon Yolanda’. The workshop was held on 30 September 2015 at Balay Kalinaw, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines. Delegates at the workshop were drawn from academia, civil society, the business community and the military2. Around 50 delegates attended the workshop. All of the delegates involved in the workshop were experts or had experience in disaster relief either in the field or as a topic of academic and policy research. Experts were drawn from the Philippines, Cambodia, Myanmar and Thailand. In some cases workshop delegates were on the ground during Typhoon Yolanda (international name: Haiyan) or the immediate aftermath. The workshop was composed of three panels entitled: ‘Poverty Alleviation in the Wake of Natural Disasters’, ‘Livelihood and Community’ and ‘Governance and Resilience’, and a closing round table discussion.ESRC-DFI

Characterising illness stages and recovery trajectories of eating disorders in young people via remote measurement technology (STORY):A multi-centre prospective cohort study protocol

Background: Eating disorders (EDs) are serious, often chronic, conditions associated with pronounced morbidity, mortality, and dysfunction increasingly affecting young people worldwide. Illness progression, stages and recovery trajectories of EDs are still poorly characterised. The STORY study dynamically and longitudinally assesses young people with different EDs (restricting; bingeing/bulimic presentations) and illness durations (earlier; later stages) compared to healthy controls. Remote measurement technology (RMT) with active and passive sensing is used to advance understanding of the heterogeneity of earlier and more progressed clinical presentations and predictors of recovery or relapse. Methods: STORY follows 720 young people aged 16–25 with EDs and 120 healthy controls for 12 months. Online self-report questionnaires regularly assess ED symptoms, psychiatric comorbidities, quality of life, and socioeconomic environment. Additional ongoing monitoring using multi-parametric RMT via smartphones and wearable smart rings (‘Ōura ring’) unobtrusively measures individuals’ daily behaviour and physiology (e.g., Bluetooth connections, sleep, autonomic arousal). A subgroup of participants completes additional in-person cognitive and neuroimaging assessments at study-baseline and after 12 months. Discussion: By leveraging these large-scale longitudinal data from participants across ED diagnoses and illness durations, the STORY study seeks to elucidate potential biopsychosocial predictors of outcome, their interplay with developmental and socioemotional changes, and barriers and facilitators of recovery. STORY holds the promise of providing actionable findings that can be translated into clinical practice by informing the development of both early intervention and personalised treatment that is tailored to illness stage and individual circumstances, ultimately disrupting the long-term burden of EDs on individuals and their families.</p

The large-scale structure of the halo of the Andromeda galaxy II. Hierarchical structure in the Pan-Andromeda Archaeological Survey

The Pan-Andromeda Archaeological Survey is a survey of $>400$ square degrees centered on the Andromeda (M31) and Triangulum (M33) galaxies that has provided the most extensive panorama of a $L_\star$ galaxy group to large projected galactocentric radii. Here, we collate and summarise the current status of our knowledge of the substructures in the stellar halo of M31, and discuss connections between these features. We estimate that the 13 most distinctive substructures were produced by at least 5 different accretion events, all in the last 3 or 4 Gyrs. We suggest that a few of the substructures furthest from M31 may be shells from a single accretion event. We calculate the luminosities of some prominent substructures for which previous estimates were not available, and we estimate the stellar mass budget of the outer halo of M31. We revisit the problem of quantifying the properties of a highly structured dataset; specifically, we use the OPTICS clustering algorithm to quantify the hierarchical structure of M31's stellar halo, and identify three new faint structures. M31's halo, in projection, appears to be dominated by two `mega-structures', that can be considered as the two most significant branches of a merger tree produced by breaking M31's stellar halo into smaller and smaller structures based on the stellar spatial clustering. We conclude that OPTICS is a powerful algorithm that could be used in any astronomical application involving the hierarchical clustering of points. The publication of this article coincides with the public release of all PAndAS data products.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. 51 pages, 24 figures, 5 tables. Some figures have degraded resolution. All PAndAS data products are available via the CADC at http://www.cadc-ccda.hia-iha.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/en/community/pandas/query.html where you can also find a version of the paper with full resolution figure

Legislating for terrorism: the Philippines’ Human Security Act 2007

In February 2007 the Philippine Senate passed the Human Security Act (HSA) otherwise known as Republic Act No. 9372: An Act to Secure the State and Protect our People From Terrorism. Philippine Senate Minority Leader Aquilino Q. Pimentel Jr. was heavily involved in the final drafting of the HSA. He gave it its final name shortly before the Senate Chamber passed it into law. Previously the Act had been known by various titles including ‘An Act to Deter and Punish Acts of Terrorism and for Other Purposes’ (Senate Bill No. 2137) and ‘An Act to Define and Punish the Crime of Terrorism, the Crime of Conspiracy to Commit Terrorism, and the Crime of Proposal to Commit Terrorism, and for Other Purposes (Senate Bill No. 2187). Thus the Human Security Act exists as an instrument of counter terrorism as opposed to human security policy.Publisher PD