community resilience in thailand: a case study of flood .../67531/metadc271841/m2/1/high... ·...

APPROVED:

Gary Webb, Major Professor

David McEntire, Committee Member

Praveen Maghelal, Committee Member

Robert Bland, Chair of the Department of

Public Administration

Thomas Evenson, Dean of the College of

Public Affairs and Community Service

Mark Wardell, Dean of the Toulouse Graduate

School

COMMUNITY RESILIENCE IN THAILAND: A CASE STUDY OF FLOOD RESPONSE

IN NAKHONSAWAN CITY MUNICIPALITY

Somporn Khunwishit, B.A., M.A.

Dissertation Prepared for the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS

May 2013

Khunwishit, Somporn. Community resilience in Thailand: A case study of flood response

in Nakhonsawan City Municipality. Doctor of Philosophy (Public Administration), May 2013,

145 pp., 3 tables, 16 figures, references, 93 titles.

Natural disasters such as flooding often affect vast areas and create infinite demands that

need to be addressed in the same time. The wide scopes and severe impacts of such catastrophes

often exceed, if not overwhelm, capacity of the national government to handle. In such a

situation, communities such as cities and neighborhoods need to rely on their own capacity

(resources, strategies, and expertise) to respond to disaster impacts at least until external

assistance can be reached. Thus, studying how communities can be resilient to the impacts of

natural disasters is important because this would enhance their ability to respond to the next

disaster better.

Within the context of great flooding in Thailand in 2011, this dissertation investigated the

factors that generated or enhanced resilience of flood stricken-communities in Thailand.

Nakhonswan City Municipality was selected as the research site. Qualitative research methods

were employed in this study. Data were collected using in-depth interview and focus group.

Thirty-six participants (28 for in-depth interview and 8 for focus group interview) from various

organizations were recruited using snowball and purposive sampling strategies. Interview data

from the field research were transcribed, translated from Thai language to English, and then

analyzed using open coding and focused coding strategies.

Analyses of in-depth interview data revealed eight conceptual themes representing factors

that constituted resilience of Nakhonsawan City Municipality, as the leading organization

responded to the flood. These factors are: availability of resources for resilience; managerial

adaptability; crisis leadership; quality workforce; knowledge sharing and learning; organizational

preparedness; organizational integration; and sectoral integration. In addition, findings from the

focus group interview with members of three strong neighborhoods found eight factors that

helped these neighborhoods respond effectively to the flood crisis. They included: self-reliance;

cooperation; local wisdom; preparedness; internal support; external support; crisis adaptability;

and pre-disaster social cohesion. This dissertation ended with the discussion of implications,

limitations and suggestions for future research.

ii

Copyright 2013

by

Somporn Khunwishit

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Though the completion of the Ph.D. program has been difficult, it is among my greatest

achievements. I realize, now more than ever, that such success is not possible without the

continual support and assistance I received from a multitude of individuals. As such, I express

my deepest appreciation and gratitude.

I want to first posthumously thank my father for his unconditional love and support.

Although I wish he was here to see my achievement and celebrate this success, I know he is with

me and guiding my future steps. My mom has been my inspiration. She motivated me to

complete each task, encouraged me to face my challenges, and gave me courage to overcome my

fears. I will always remember her encouraging words: “You can do it!” To me, you are the most

insightful and loving mother in the world.

Second, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my major professor, Dr. Gary

Webb, for his kind and continued support. Without his time, resources, and expertise, this

dissertation would not be as well crafted. I also thank Dr. David McEntire and Dr. Praveen

Maghelal, my committee members, for their time and valuable advice.

I also owe sincere and earnest thankfulness to many other individuals: my former advisor

Associate Professor Sida Sonsri; my friend and big sister, Kittiwan Junrith; the Johnson family;

the Gilbert family; the King family; my dearest friends, David Wachira, Josh Daspit, Siwaporn

Chaicharoen, and Marina Saitgalina; the Wachira family; the Samruayruen family; Mr. Jedsada

Chatree; Ms. Daranee K. Koomsin; Ms. Jiraporn Junrith; and the Limsaihua family. These

individuals and families have offered both tangible and intangible support during my time at the

University of North Texas.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................... iii

LIST OF TABLES ........................................................................................................................ vii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ....................................................................................................... viii

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 1

Overview of Study ...................................................................................................................... 1

Focus of Study ............................................................................................................................ 1

Statement of the Problem ............................................................................................................ 3

Objectives and Significance of this Dissertation ........................................................................ 7

Preview of Dissertation ............................................................................................................... 8

CHAPTER 2 THE 2011 THAILAND FLOODS ......................................................................... 11

Introduction of Chapter ............................................................................................................. 11

Overview of the Event .............................................................................................................. 11

Overview of the Response Efforts ............................................................................................ 14

Floods in Nakhonsawan Province and Its Response................................................................. 15

Summary of Chapter ................................................................................................................. 18

CHAPTER 3 REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ........................................................................ 20


Defining Resilience ................................................................................................................... 20

Factors Influencing Community Resilience.............................................................................. 28

v


CHAPTER 4 METHODOLOGY ................................................................................................. 45


Overview of Qualitative Research ............................................................................................ 45

Qualitative Methods and Disaster Research ............................................................................. 46

Qualitative Research in Community Resilience ....................................................................... 47

Participant Selection ................................................................................................................. 48

Data Collection ......................................................................................................................... 50

Data Coding and Analysis ........................................................................................................ 54

IRB Process ............................................................................................................................... 55


CHAPTER 5 RESULTS 1: RESILIENCE OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT.................................. 57


Resources for Resilience ........................................................................................................... 58

Managerial Adaptability ........................................................................................................... 70

Crisis Leadership ...................................................................................................................... 74

Quality Workforce .................................................................................................................... 81

Knowledge Sharing and Learning ............................................................................................ 85

Organizational Preparedness ..................................................................................................... 87

Organizational Integration ........................................................................................................ 90

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Sectoral Integration ................................................................................................................... 92


CHAPTER 6 RESULTS 2: RESILIENCE OF NEIGHBORHOODS ......................................... 99


Self-reliance ............................................................................................................................ 100

Cooperation ............................................................................................................................. 103

Local Wisdom ......................................................................................................................... 105

Preparedness ........................................................................................................................... 107

Internal Support ...................................................................................................................... 110

External Support ..................................................................................................................... 112

Crisis Adaptability .................................................................................................................. 115

Pre-disaster Social Cohesion................................................................................................... 118

Summary of Chapter ............................................................................................................... 120

CHAPTER 7 CONCLUSION..................................................................................................... 122

Summary of Dissertation ........................................................................................................ 122

Conceptual Implications ......................................................................................................... 123

Practical Implications.............................................................................................................. 125

Limitations and Suggestions for Future Research .................................................................. 128

APPENDIX A INTERVIEW GUIDE ........................................................................................ 130

APPENDIX B IRB DOCUMENTS............................................................................................ 136

LIST OF REFERENCES ............................................................................................................ 138

vii

LIST OF TABLES

Page

Table 1 Psychological Definitions of Resilience ........................................................................ 22

Table 2 Definitions of Resilience in Disaster and Crisis Management Field ............................. 25

Table 3 Summary of Resilience Definition and Focus of Each Academic Field ....................... 27

viii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Page

Figure 1. Natural disasters reported 1900-2011. ............................................................................. 3

Figure 2. Number of people reported affected by natural disasters 1900-2011 .............................. 4

Figure 3. Estimated damage (US$ billion) caused by reported natural disasters 1900-2011 ......... 5

Figure 4. Map of Thailand’s affected provinces. ......................................................................... 12

Figure 5. Impacts of flooding in Nakhonsawan City Municipality. ............................................. 16

Figure 6. Flooding in Thailand’s central region (including Nakhonsawan Province) .................. 17

Figure 7. Factors for resilience of local government .................................................................... 58

Figure 8. Resources used by Nakhonsawan City Municipality in flood response ........................ 59

Figure 9. Public administrators, workers and volunteers worked together in flood response ...... 77

Figure 10. Municipal employees worked day and night shifts ..................................................... 83

Figure 11. Representatives of organizations attended daily meeting at the provincial office. ..... 86

Figure 12. Factors for resilience of neighborhoods .................................................................... 100

Figure 13. Members of neighborhoods self-operated shelters. ................................................... 103

Figure 14. Neighborhood members volunteered to work on area protection efforts. ................. 111

Figure 15. Military officers were sent to support response operations of neighborhoods .......... 114

Figure 16. A neighborhood patrol team established during the crisis. ....................................... 118

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Overview of Study

This dissertation examines community resilience in Thailand. It delves into how

Nakhonsawan City Municipality in Thailand successfully responded to the massive flood in 2011

and the factors that created such a resilient response capacity. While disaster scholars suggest

that resilience is necessary for affected communities to successfully manage the consequences of

disasters, we do not yet fully understand what factors or circumstances generate community

resilience. In an effort to address this significant void in the literature, this dissertation provides a

detailed case study of how one disaster-stricken community was able to exhibit resilience and

survive a massive flood.

Focus of Study

Community resilience is a broad concept, different academic fields define and study the

topic in different ways, and research on resilience has been applied at various levels of analysis

(Bruijne, Boin, and Eeten, 2010). For example, disaster psychologists define resilience as a

capacity to draw upon personal and social resources to deal with adversity and manage the

consequences of disasters. Thus, psychological researchers are more interested in how an

individual or a household/family within a community copes with adversity and experiences post-

traumatic growth. For them, individuals or households are the primary units of analysis.

Sociologists and emergency management scholars, on the other hand, apply resilience to

understand how social systems (e.g., organizations and communities as a whole) adapt to

extreme events. For social scientists resilience is more of a collective capacity of or collective

action taken by all constituent parts (or social units) of a community.

2

How resilience is conceptualized is important because it has implications for developing

research questions and selecting appropriate methodologies. For example, psychological-based

research on resilience, which treats the individual as the unit of analysis, often, employs

quantitative methods in which questionnaires are administered to large samples in an effort to

measure and quantify such things as post-traumatic stress and coping capacity. Sociological or

disaster management-based research, on the other hand, typically relies upon various qualitative

strategies to study community resilience. From this perspective, resilience is a characteristic not

of individuals but instead of organizations and communities, and it is something that often only

emerges and reveals itself after a disaster has struck. Thus, from this perspective, the most

effective way to capture the emergent and processual nature of resilience is for researchers to

immerse themselves in the community, interview key stakeholders, and observe events as they

unfold in an effort to better understand resilience as a dynamic and ongoing process.

Given its focus on the community level of analysis, this dissertation follows the

sociological and emergency management research traditions. Thus, it looks at resilience as the

collective capacity of or collective action taken by social units, such as neighborhoods,

communities, and organizations, within Nakhonsawan City Municipality. The aim of the study

is to better understand how these organizations or groups of people responded to the flooding

and what factors or circumstances contributed to the success of the response effort. Since the

focus of this study is not on resilience of an individual or a household, qualitative methods are

used to collect and analyze data obtained from interviews with key representatives from various

organizations.

3

Statement of the Problem

Humankind has a long history of confronting the destructive consequences caused by

disasters (Paton, 2006). Disasters can be defined as extreme events that cause “significant loss or

disruption to established social processes, functions, activities and interactions” (Paton, 2006, p.

6). By their very definition, disasters produce impacts and consequences that exceed the capacity

of affected communities to cope, resulting in the need for national and/or international assistance

(Gregg and Houghton, 2006).

Although emergency management technologies have been developed and used to predict

the likelihood of their occurrence and mitigate their potential impacts, disasters continue to

happen and produced more severe impacts to people around the world. Data from the Centre for

Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) emergency events database, EM-DAT, for

example, suggest that the number of natural disasters has increased exponentially from 1900 to

2011 (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Natural disasters reported 1900-2011 (CRED, 2013a).

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Although the number of people killed seems to have declined, particularly for the

wealthiest developed nations, data from the same source indicate that the number of people

affected and estimated damages caused by these natural disasters have increased. Figure 2 shows

number of people reported affected and Figure 3 illustrates estimated damages caused by natural

disasters from 1900 to 2011.

Figure 2. Number of people reported affected by natural disasters 1900-2011 (CRED, 2013b).

Disaster data collected by PreventionWeb give a consistent outlook. PreventionWeb’s

disaster statistics by region indicate that, from 1980 to 2008, the world faced 8,711 natural

disasters (3,341 events in Asia; 2,101 events in Americas; 1,190 events in Europe; 1,699 events

in Africa; 380 events in Oceania). Globally, these natural disasters killed 2.1 million people

(73,568 people per year) and caused about US$ 1.6 trillion economic damage (or US$ 55 billion

per year) (PreventionWeb, 2013a; 2013b; 2013c; 2013d; 2013e).

5

Figure 3. Estimated damage (US$ billion) caused by reported natural disasters 1900-2011 (CRED, 2013c).

It is often assumed that when disaster occurs, local or national governments and other

professional response organizations are responsible for helping victims in affected communities.

However, as stated previously, disasters by their very definition generate impacts that exceed

local capacity to respond. Yet, in some cases disaster-stricken communities are impacted in such

a way that their connections to other communities are cut off, which may severely limit their

ability to receive outside aid, at least during the initial impact phase. In such instances, those

affected communities need to rely on their own capacity and resources to cope with the adverse

consequences of disasters. In other words, resilience is needed if the stricken community wants

to successfully deal with a disaster using its own capacity and resources.

In addition to the potential problem of being isolated from external assistance and having

limited access to normal societal resources and functions in times of disasters (Paton et al.,

2006), the inherent limitations of disaster plans and mitigation efforts necessitate us to create

6

resilient communities. Boin et al. (2010) argue that the failure of the political-administrative

system and the people in New Orleans in dealing with impacts and addressing the needs created

by Hurricane Katrina revealed the lack and need of resilience. Boin (2010) adds that the

unforeseen and impossible challenges created by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Sumatran

earthquake and Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 demonstrated that planning and prevention cannot

fully protect communities and, hence, building resilient response system is needed. In short,

Hurricane Katrina and the Indian Ocean tsunami shifted the focus of policy makers and scholars

from anticipation and prevention of disaster toward answering a question of how to increase

community’s capacity to respond to and recover from disasters (Boin, 2010).

Although resilience is widely perceived as having the potential to help affected

communities to effectively deal with disasters, the issue of what exactly constitutes resilience is

still unclear. While scholars have long been interested, at least implicitly, in the notion of

resilience, efforts to explicitly define, study, and better understand the concept are relatively

new. In fact, most of existing studies on resilience deal with defining the term, unpacking the

concept, and offering theoretical insights and hypotheses. Efforts to conduct empirical research

on community resilience has just begun as early as the 21st century, including the works of Paton

et al. (2001) in Australia and New Zealand, Tobin and Whiteford (2002) in Ecuador, and Kendra

and Wachtendorf (2003) in the United States. Since then, there have been some efforts to

empirically examine this topic using different frameworks, at different levels of analysis,

utilizing different research methods, and in different contexts (e.g., Berke et al., 2008; Jang and

Wang, 2009; Cutter et al., 2010; and Comfort et al., 2010). As such, community resilience as a

research topic in the field of disaster management is viewed as the “budding field of inquiry”

(Boin et al., p. 11).

7

Because this line of research is still relatively young and because scholars approach their

works at different levels of analysis, there is still no clear definition of resilience. Thus, a major

objective of this dissertation is to contribute to the literature by providing some clarity on what

constitutes community resilience. Specifically, the dissertation examines resilience in the

context of flooding in Thailand. The major research question that guides this dissertation is:

What are the factors that generate or enhance resilience of flood-stricken communities in

Thailand?

Objectives and Significance of this Dissertation

During the period of disaster impact, people may be isolated from external assistance and

have limited access to normal community and societal resources and functions for several days

(Paton et al., 2006). Thus, studying how resilience can be created or enhanced is important

because it is their own response capacity and resources that communities need to have to

successfully manage the consequences of disasters.

This dissertation is aimed at documenting how affected communities adapt and respond

to the consequences of natural disasters and, ultimately, identifying what creates such response

capacity. The findings of this dissertation contribute to the field of disaster management in

several important ways.

First, the study will help emergency management scholars and practitioners identify

factors/circumstances that generate or enhance resilience, which will allow emergency planners

and communities to better understand how to create and improve their adaptive capacity. For

example, emergency planners and people in the community can build their adaptive capacity by

making choices about community characteristics, the relationships between its members, and the

community’s relationship with the wider society (Paton, 2006). Paton and Gow (2008) also argue

8

that by identifying the processes and competencies that underpin the emergence of this resilient

capacity, the community can develop the capacities of its citizens, organizations, and institutions

to cope with the disruption wrought by a disaster.

Identifying what enhances resilience can improve community’s responses to disasters.

Paton and Gow (2008) argue that the development of adaptive capabilities prior to the disaster

can increase response effectiveness. Resilience has significant implications for the quality of a

community’s overall response and recovery prospects because it helps the community to

proactively take the steps necessary to develop its capacity to respond effectively and hasten its

recovery should a disaster occur.

Finally, examining resilience in the context of massive flooding also has important

conceptual or theoretical contributions to the field of disaster research. Specifically, it provides

empirical evidence that supports and strengthens the field by clarifying and refining a central

concept, namely, resilience. As noted earlier, this newly developed field of inquiry has just

begun only about a decade ago, so more empirical research is clearly needed to strengthen its

theoretical foundation. Studying this topic in different hazard and cultural contexts allows

researchers to investigate whether factors that create resilience in one situation (such as those

developed from volcanic eruption situation) and one community (e.g., a community in western,

individualistic cultural country) will also enhance resilience in another situation (e.g., flooding)

and another community (e.g., a community in an Asian, collectivist-cultural country).

Preview of Dissertation

In order to answer the central question of what factors generate or enhance resilience, this

dissertation is divided into seven chapters. Chapter 2 describes the 2011 flooding in Thailand,

providing general information about the tropical storm NOCK-TEN that struck the country, an

9

overview of response efforts of the national government, and the impact of flooding in

Nakhonsawan City Municipality and its responses. This chapter sets the scene and provides the

context for examining community resilience in the selected research site.

The next chapter, Chapter 3, reviews the literature on community resilience. It begins

with the discussion of how each academic discipline studies and defines resilience. Then, factors

that are believed to influence resilience are elaborated. Although the focus of this study is to

examine the resilient capacity of groups of people (e.g., neighborhoods), local government,

public and private organizations, and other social units that constitute or contribute to the

resilience of a community (Nakhonsawan City Municipality) as a whole, this exhaustive review

of literature covers factors of resilience at both individual/household and community levels.

Finally, gaps in the literature are identified.

Chapter 4 describes the research methodology used in this study. It begins with an

overview of qualitative research. Then, the use and application of qualitative research methods in

disaster management and community resilience studies is discussed. Next, procedures for

participant selection and methods of data collection are presented. The chapter ends with an

explanation of the data analysis techniques employed in the study.

Chapter 5 presents findings related to the resilience of local government. Based on

conceptual themes that emerged from in-depth interviews with respondents from various

organizations and sectors, the chapter identifies eight factors that contribute to the resilience of

local government. In presenting the eight factors, the chapter focuses primarily on the Office of

Nakhonsawan City Municipality, which was the organization that took lead role in responding to

the 2011 flood crisis.

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Chapter 6 also presents results of the research, focusing on the resilience of

neighborhoods. In addition to strong local governmental institutions, strong neighborhoods also

contribute to community resilience. When the neighborhoods are strong, they are not only able

to help themselves in times of disasters but also lessen the burden of local government and other

response organizations. Similar to chapter on local government, Chapter 6 identifies several

factors that promote neighborhood resilience that emerged from the qualitative data.

Chapter 7, the last chapter of this dissertation, concludes this research. It first reiterates

the focus and objectives of this research. Then, methods used to conduct the research and

findings are again briefly discussed. Finally, discussions about research contributions,

limitations, and suggestions for future research on disaster resilience are provided.

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CHAPTER 2

THE 2011 THAILAND GREAT FLOODS

Introduction of Chapter

This chapter describes the 2011 flood disaster in Thailand. It provides background

information about the tropical storm NOCK-TEN, the cause of this catastrophic event, and its

consequences. The chapter goes on to elaborate how the Thai’s national government responded

to this disaster and addressed the ensuing needs or problems. Thereafter, the chapter introduces

Nakhonsawan City Municipality, the selected research site, by providing information about its

location, geography, population, economy, size, and jurisdictional or administrative boundary.

Such information helps us understand the vulnerability of this municipality. Then, the chapter

discusses the impact of flooding on this municipality and efforts undertaken to respond to the

disaster.

Overview of the Event

In 2011, Thailand faced the worst floods in its history when the severe tropical storm

NOCK-TEN made its landfall in the Land of Smiles on July 25th. The storm caused damage to

most areas of the country. Thailand’s 24/7 Emergency Operation Center for Flood, Storm and

Landslide, Department of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation (DDPM) concluded that the

tropical storm NOCK-TEN caused significant damages to 65 provinces (and 30 sub-districts in

Bangkok) (see Figure 4), resulted in 815 people confirmed dead and left three people missing

(DDPM, January 20, 2012).

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Figure 4. Map of Thailand’s affected provinces (Purnell, 2011a).

The physical, social and economic impacts of this event were very destructive. Data from

DDPM’s Report of Relief Assistance as of February 17, 2012 indicated that 2,289,562

households in 62 provinces and 1,089,242 households in 30 sub-districts of Bangkok were

13

affected. It has also been estimated that a series of floods caused extensive damages to 12.99

million rai of farmland (or about 20,784 kilometers square), 30.32 million heads of livestock

(DDPM, 2012) and 2,143 educational institutes (United Nations Thailand, 2011).

Lifelines, infrastructure, and industrial facilities in major provinces across the country

were also devastated. It has been reported that 77 highways in 15 provinces and 202 roads in 30

provinces were not passable (DDPM Flood Situation Report No. 1, October 25, 2011), 9,859

factories in Ayuttaya Province and Patumthani Province were damaged, more than 1.8 million

employees and 2.85 hundred thousand small and medium enterprises were affected (Kasikorn

Research Center, 2011). The World Bank estimated that the damage caused by this catastrophe

was about 1.4 trillion baht (or about US$ 45 billion) (Bangkok Post, November 26, 2011).

This event created several challenges to Thailand in terms of disaster management. First,

the country needed to undertake its largest evacuation and sheltering operation in its history. The

floods forced several hundred thousands of people to leave their homes and, in response to the

mass evacuation, the Thai government set up and operated 1,742 temporary shelters across the

country. These shelters were capable of serving up to 1.8 million people (ThaiFlood.com,

December 7, 2011). The floods created problems that had never existed in the country before.

The most notable problem was the conflicts between residents living in the two sides of the flood

barriers, as those who lived outside the flood barriers claimed that, by creating those flood

barriers to save the other side of the area, they were unfairly flooded. In some cases, this issue

developed into a full-blown armed confrontation. The conflicts not only damaged social

cohesion in the flooded communities, they also delayed the recovery effort because they

complicated government plans to drain the floodwater out of affected areas.

14

Overview of the Response Efforts

The consequences of this disaster that occurred in the northern and northeastern

provinces in the first two months were primarily responded by the local governments (both the

provinces and municipalities) with the cooperation of and assistance from the Department of

Disaster Prevention and Mitigation (both regional and central offices). The national government

started to play a role and take a serious action when it perceived that the mass of floodwater was

approaching the central region (including Bangkok) and the Flood Relief Operations Center

(FROC) was set up at Don Mueang Domestic Airport to coordinate response efforts and deliver

aids.

Response efforts of the national government focused on both incident management and

life and property protection. To manage the incident, the national government set up the Flood

Relief Operations Center (FROC), which was located at the Domestic Terminal Building of the

Don Mueng Airport. FROC was a directing office that integrated response organizations from

both public and private sectors and provided a one-stop disaster management service. This ad

hoc organization not only served as the national emergency operation center who coordinated

response efforts and aid delivery operations, it also had a centralized authority to direct all

related public entities at all levels in an effort to help the victims across the nation. FROC was

responsible for controlling distribution of food and essential supplies, providing logistical

support to emergency workers, issuing warnings, evacuating residents and providing shelters to

the displaced, directing floodwater draining effort, and setting up donation center and managing

donations and assistances (Prime Minister’s Office, 2011).

In terms of life and property protection, the national government focused its efforts on

draining and pushing the floodwater to the Gulf of Thailand, mass care provisions to victims in

15

affected provinces, and protection of the risk areas from potential flooding in Bangkok and other

peripheral areas (Prime Minister Office, 2011). Floodwater draining and pushing efforts were

undertaken 24 hours a day and led by the Royal Thai Navy with the cooperation of Bangkok

Metropolitan Administration and the private sector. In an effort to help victims, the national

government focused on addressing the basic needs of the people (such as providing food, water,

and essential supplies) and mobilizing resources and expertise from public agencies, the military,

police, voluntary organizations and the citizen groups to support the relief missions (Prime

Minister Office, 2011).

Floods in Nakhonsawan Province and Its Response

Nakhonsawan Province was one of the hardest hit areas because it is located where the

three major rivers from the northern region converge to form the Chao Phraya River, the major

artery of Thailand. According to the Royal Institute, Nakhonsawan Province is located in the

upper part of the central region of Thailand. The three rivers from the north not only form the

Chao Phraya River, which cuts the province into two parts, they also make this province a vast

low-lying area. The most low-lying areas of the province lie in six of its fifteen districts

including Ampur Muang Nakhonsawan (Nakhonsawan City Municipality), Ampur Bunpot Pisai,

Ampur Choom Saeng, Ampur Tha-Takho, Ampur Grok-Phra, and Ampur Payuha-Kiri

(Nakhonsawan Province, 2011). As a result, these six districts are vulnerable to repeated

flooding, especially during the monsoon season. Nakhonsawan Province spans 9,597.677

kilometers square, is 273 kilometers from Bangkok, and has a population of 1,072,618

(Nakhonsawan Province, 2011).

16

Figure 5. Impacts of flooding in Nakhonsawan City Municipality (Office of Nakhonsawan City Municipality, 2011).

Flooding in Nakhonsawan Province began in early August and lasted until late October.

Data from ThaiFlood.com, a nonprofit organization dedicating its effort to providing information

about flooding in Thailand, indicated that, as of September 19, 2011, all areas of the province

were inundated. Ten districts, including Ampur Muang Nakhonsawan (or Nakhonsawan City

Municipality, the research site of this dissertation), were critically affected and the other five

districts were also severely flooded (ThaiFlood.com, September 19, 2011). It has been estimated

that the total damage from this disaster cost about 10,000 million Thai baht (about US$ 3.3

billion) (Thai News Agency, October 30, 2011), 62 people were killed (Nakhonsawan Province’s

Office of Public Health, November 1, 2011), 111,952 households and 352,752 people were

affected, and 903,400.50 rai of farmlands (about 1,445 kilometers square) were damaged

17

(National News Bureau of Thailand, October 22, 2011). Figure 6 shows flooding in Thailand’s

central region (including Nakhonsawan Province, the research site).

Figure 6. Flooding in Thailand’s central region (including Nakhonsawan Province, the research site) (Purnell, 2011b).

The province responded to this disaster by declaring all of its fifteen districts disaster

zones and setting up flood relief centers in these affected districts to receive and distribute aid.

The province actively mobilized resources and technical assistance from various organizations

both within and outside its jurisdiction. Within the areas of Ampur Muang Nakhonsawan (or

Nakhonsawan City Municipality), eleven temporary shelters were set up for 8,766 displaced

persons and mass care was provided to these people (National News Bureau of Thailand,

October 22, 2011). Other response efforts of Nakhonsawan City Municipality were distribution

of essential supplies to those who did not evacuate, draining water out of administrative and

18

economic areas, laying sandbags to strengthen the levee and, thus, preventing the floodwater

from entering the areas, evacuation, search and rescue, building temporary bridges and

facilitating transportation (National News Bureau of Thailand, October 22, 2011).

Nakhonsawan City Municipality exhibited a higher level of adaptation as shown by its

effective improvised responses and quick recovery than any of the other places that were hit by

this same disaster. Residents and volunteers were actively engaged in response efforts and this

highly cooperated effort was widely witnessed among Thai people. The Prime Minister of

Thailand praised Nakhonsawan City Municipality as the model for successful response and quick

recovery (Bangkokbiznews.com, November 6, 2011). Because of its high adaptive capacity,

Nakhonsawan Municipality is selected as a case for this study of community resilience.

Summary of Chapter

The severe tropical storm NOCK-TEN struck Thailand and created widespread damage

across the country. The significant scope of this disaster registered it as Thailand’s worst

flooding in 50 years. A series of floods that occurred since late July killed 815 people and

affected more than 3 million households in 65 provinces and Bangkok, the country’s capital city.

The storm also created problems that never existed in the country, such as the largest sheltering

operation and the flood barrier conflicts among residents. The national government responded to

this catastrophe by setting up the Flood Relief Operation Center (FROC) to serve as a country’s

leading organization for incident management and a center for disaster aid distribution.

As this chapter has shown, Nakhonsawan Province was one of the hardest hit

communities because it is located where three major rivers converge to form the Chao Phraya

River, the major artery of Thailand. Despite the devastating impacts of the floods, Nakhonsawan

City Municipality successfully drained the floodwater and resumed its normal functions in less

19

than a month. Its reputation for effective response and quick recovery was widely recognized

and, hence, the national government praised it as the model for successful response and quick

recovery that other municipalities should follow.

20

CHAPTER 3

REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE


This chapter discusses various definitions of resilience that exist in the research literature,

and it reviews different factors or circumstances that are believed by scholars to influence

community resilience. It begins by providing various perspectives on community resilience or,

more specifically, how each academic discipline studies and defines resilience. Then, drawing on

several studies from various disciplines, factors or circumstances that generate resilience are

discussed. Although, the focus on this study is to examine adaptive capacity of groups of people,

such as neighborhoods, governmental and non-governmental organizations, and other social

units, this exhaustive review of literature covers factors of resilience at both the

individual/household and community levels. Finally, the chapter identifies and discusses gaps in

the literature.

Defining Resilience

Resilience is a topic of discussion and research in many academic disciplines and, thus,

has various definitions. In engineering sciences, for example, the concept is applied to the quality

or ability of materials or technical systems (e.g., buildings, bridges) to survive sudden shocks

(Boin et al., 2010). It is also used to describe the ability of infrastructure to resist the blow,

absorb the impact, and restore or recover to the pre-event state (Cutter et al., 2010). From an

engineering perspective, then, resilience refers to the ability of a system to return to its stability

(the pre-event status).

When applied to ecology, resilience can be thought of as the ability of a system to

maintain its fundamental functions in the course of disturbing events. For example, Holling

21

(1973) defines resilience as “the ability of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic

function and structure” (p. 17). Ecological scholars also discuss resilience in terms of a broader

concept of sustainability as the capacity to absorb stress and shock (Rose, 2004) and somehow

equate this concept to survival. Walker et al. (2006) argues that ecological resilience is the

continuous ability to manage changes and surprises, to meet current demands without eroding

future needs and to maintain control. Thus, the more resilient a system, the larger the disturbance

it can absorb without shifting into an alternate regime. In this perspective, resilience is linked to

sustainability and survival. A low resilient system has limited sustainability and, thus, it is

unlikely that such a system will survive for a long time.

In psychological research, resilience is used to understand how an individual and a

community cope with adversity and experience post-traumatic growth. Resilience from this

perspective is defined as “a function of the operation of personal characteristics, the ability to

impose a sense of coherence and meaning on atypical and adverse experience, the existence of

community practices (e.g. supportive social networks) which mitigate adverse consequences and

maximize potential for recovery and growth” (Violanti et al.as cited in Paton and Johnston, 2001,

p. 273). Unlike engineers who view resilience as the ability of the system or building to bounce

back after the shocks, psychologists perceive that the focus of resilience is the ability to adapt

(adaptive capacity) to the new reality created by extreme changes. Paton (2006) argues that

defining resilience with the notion of bouncing back might not be accurate because it does not

capture the reality of disaster experience and its full implication. In psychology, disaster is

perceived as a catalyst for change, growth, and development. Changes created by a disaster

present the community members with a new reality that may differ in several fundamental ways

from pre-disaster state. Thus, the phrase “bouncing back” might not capture this reality because

22

“it is the changed reality that people must adapt to” and, thus, resilience should be thought of as

“a measure of how well people and societies can adapt to a changed reality and capitalize on the

new possibilities offered” (Paton, 2006, p. 8).

Psychological resilience has been extensively investigated in New Zealand and Australia

since the late 20th century and, thus, it is variously defined by disaster-psychological scholars.

Many of these scholars often include such words as stress, personal characteristics, and growth

or post traumatic growth in their psychological definition of resilience. Table 1 shows the

various psychological definitions of resilience.

Table 1 Psychological Definitions of Resilience

Authors Definition of Resilience Paton, Johnston, and Burgelt (2006)

A capacity to draw upon personal and social resources to manage the consequences of disasters.

Kulig (1999) The ability of a community to not only deal with adversity but in doing so to reach a higher level of functioning.

Paton and Gow (2008)

The capacity of the societal institutions to confront atypical circumstances, to generate different ways of engaging with the community and manage the relationships of community members in times of disaster, and the citizens must have a capacity for self-reliance.

McCubbin, McCubbin and Thompson (1993)

The characteristics, dimensions, and components within families that help them to be resistant in the face of disruptions resulting from change and to demonstrate the ability to adapt when faced with crisis situations.

Lahad (2008) A community’s ability to stand firm in the face of potential loss of life or when recovering from loss of life/damage.

The definition of resilience in urban planning and geographic research is also unique. In

urban planning, resilience is viewed as a goal a community should strive for if it wants to be

successful in reducing disaster effects. Johnston et al. (2006) argue that a resilient community is

organized in a way that the impact of a disaster is minimized and the recovery process can be

quickened. In geographic research, resilience is conceptualized as something that is derived from

23

the antecedent conditions and can be changed (increased or decreased) over time. Cutter et al.

(2008) propose the disaster resilience of place (DROP) model to be used to examine the

variability of resilience across places and as a theoretical model for developing measures of

resilience. They argue that the community’s inherent resilience is associated with its antecedent

conditions. The antecedent or present conditions that influence resilience in each community

include: ecological; social; economic; organizational/institutional; infrastructural; and

community conditions. Although the term “inherent resilience” is not defined, it is referred to as

“a set of capacities that can be fostered through interventions and policies, which in turn help

build and enhance a community’s ability to respond and recover from disasters” (Cutter et al.,

2010, p. 2).

Within the realm of social sciences, resilience is applied to understand how a social

system can adapt to and recover from an extreme event such as a natural or technological

disaster. Resilience is given different definitions based on the theoretical focus of each research.

Socio-technical researchers define community resilience as “the capacity of a social system (e.g.,

an organization, city, society) to proactively adapt to and recover from disturbances that are

perceived within the system to fall outside the range of normal and expected disturbances” (Boin

et al., 2010, p. 9). This definition of community resilience captures the capacity to adapt,

improvise, and recover. Resilience in this perspective is viewed as a set of qualities or

characteristics that a stricken society needs to have if it is to rebound. Other socio-technical

researchers view community resilience as “the capacity for collective action in the face of

unexpected extreme events that shatter infrastructure and disrupt normal operating condition”

(Comfort et al., 2010, p. 33). These scholars maintain that mental process of sense making or

24

cognition, improvisation, innovation, and problem solving are core elements of community

resilience.

Crisis/disaster management and public administration researchers also have their own

ways to define community resilience. Buckle (2006) reviews various definitions of resilience

given by different institutions and points out some interesting views. First, resilience is a

multifarious concept that can apply to the capacity to withstand loss and to recover from a loss if

it occurs. Second, resilience is related to vulnerability and, for practical purposes, we can assume

that “if a person or group has a high vulnerability then they have a low resilience” (p. 90). Third,

resilience does not belong to or is not the quality or characteristic possessed only by the

individual. Other bigger social units including family, tribe or clan, locality or neighborhood,

community, social associations such as clubs and faith congregations, organization such as a

bureaucracy or private sector firm, and systems such as environmental systems and economic

systems can also possess resilience. In this sense, community resilience is “an organic

relationship between individual, group, and community in a context of a hazard” (p. 96). Finally,

resilience, like vulnerability, is context-specific and can change over time. Thus, resilience (and

vulnerability) should not be viewed as the inherent characteristics of a particular individual,

group or locality. Rather, they should be thought of as the characteristics that can be reduced or

enhanced with observable and measurable effects.

Some disaster researchers define resilience in terms of the ability of a community to

address mitigation, response, and recovery needs. For example, Bruneau et al. define community

resilience to earthquake hazards as “the ability of social units (e.g., organizations, communities)

to mitigate hazards, contain the effects of disasters when they occur, and carry out recovery

activities in ways that minimize social disruption and mitigate the effects of future earthquake”

25

(as cited in Rose, 2004, p. 308). This is the first definition that covers at least three phases of the

comprehensive emergency management: mitigation; response; and recovery. Others emphasize

only ability of a community to deal with response and recovery needs. Other definitions of

resilience in disaster and crisis management field can be found in the work of Bruijne et al.

(2010) and are presented in Table 2.

Table 2 Definitions of Resilience in Disaster and Crisis Management Field Authors Definition of Resilience Janssen et al. (2006)

The measure of a system’s capacity to absorb and recover from the occurrence of a hazard event.

Comfort (1999)

The capacity (of complex adaptive system) to adapt existing resources and skills to new situations and operating conditions.

Tierney (2003)

Both the ability to adjust to normal and anticipated stresses and strains and to adapt to sudden shocks and extraordinary demands. Resilience spans both pre-event measures that seek to prevent disaster-related damage and post-event strategies designed to cope with and minimize disaster impacts.

Maguire and Hogan (2007)

A resilient community is one that predicts and anticipates disasters; absorbs, responds and recovers from the shock; and improvises and innovates in response to disasters

Godschalk (2003)

The resilience of a community is an overarching attribute that reflects the degree of community preparedness and the ability to respond to and recover from a disaster

Organizational scientists also define resilience. The definition of resilience in

organizational and management science does not only mean adaptive capacity, but also the

ability to learn. For example, while Weicke defines resilience as the ability to improvise and

bounce back (as cited in Bruijne et al., 2010, p. 23), Wildavsky defines it as “the capacity to cope

with unanticipated dangers after they have become manifest, learning to bounce back” (as cited

in Bruijne et al., 2010, p. 22), and Weicke et al. argue that “resilience is not only knowing how to

regroup during a crisis and keep going, it also means being able to come away from the event

26

with an even greater capacity to prevent and contain future errors” (as cited in Bruijne et al.,

2010, p. 23).

Finally, political science (including public policy and international relations) and the field

of economics also offer conceptual definitions of resilience. In political science and public

policy, resilience is defined as the ability to fail gracefully or to have a rebound capacity

(Birkland, 2010). Scholars in these fields argue that the nature and function of politics are

important to community resilience because politics is about how to allocate what resources to

whom and when. Disasters and disaster related policies are directly political because most of the

resources and assistance are mainly distributed through the government system. Thus, “most if

not all aspects of resilience is influenced by public policy, either by design or by accident”

(Birkland, 2010, p. 108).

In the field of economics, resilience is defined as “the inherent and adaptive responses to

disaster that enable individuals and communities to avoid some potential losses” (Rose, 2004, p.

307). This definition distinguishes inherent resilience from adaptive resilience. Inherent

resilience refers to “the ability under normal circumstances” and adaptive resilience, on the other

hand, is conceptualized as “the ability in crisis situation due to ingenuity or extra effort” (p. 308).

Rose (2004) argues that economic resilience can take place at both micro and macro levels (from

small firms, households, and markets to macro-economy). Ingenuity and resourcefulness applied

during and after the event are the emphases of economic resilience. Thus, unlike mitigation that

emphasizes new technology or institution, economic resilience focuses on human behavior.

In conclusion, these various definitions reflect that resilience is a multifaceted concept

and it is far from clearly defined (see Table 3 for summary of resilience definition and the focus

of each academic field). Manyena (2006) argues that resilience is a vague concept and seeking a

27

consensus on what it means is still a challenge that faces resilience researchers. One reason why

this concept is vague and has several meanings is that previous research on resilience has been

applied at various levels of analysis and in a wide variety of academic disciplines. Bruijne et al.

(2010) recommend that resilience should be understood as “a concept with different meanings in

different disciplines” (p. 30).

Table 3

Summary of Resilience Definition and Focus of Each Academic Field

Perspective/Field of Study Definition Focus & Author Engineering Ability of materials or a

technical system to return to its stability (the pre-event status)

Technical systems: buildings, bridges, infrastructure

Ecological Ability of a system to maintain its fundamental functions in the course disturbing events (capacity to absorb stress and shock, ability to survive)

Ecological system (Holling, 1973; Walker et al., 2006)

Psychological Capacity of individual, household, or community to cope with adversity and experience post-traumatic growth

Individual, household Ability to adapt to the new reality created by extreme changes (Violanti et al. as cited in Paton and Johnston, 2001)

Geographical A set of capacities (fostered through interventions and policies) that builds and enhances a community’s ability to respond and recover from disasters

Places, regions, areas (Cutter et al., 2008; Cutter et al., 2010)

Socio-technical Capacity of a social system (e.g., an organization, city, society) to proactively adapt to and recover from disturbances

Organizations, communities, neighborhoods, cities, society (Boin et al., 2010; Comfort et al., 2010)

Emergency management Ability of a community to address mitigation, response, and recovery needs

Community (Bruneau et al. as cited in Rose, 2004)

28

In this dissertation, community resilience is defined as the ability of all constituent parts

of a community such as neighborhoods, governmental and non-governmental organizations, and

other social units to mobilize necessary resources (from its own sources and, if needed, external

sources) and to organize a coherent effort to respond to natural disasters. Since the focus of this

dissertation is on the disaster response phase, the proposed definition of community resilience

thus emphasizes the collective capacity of a community to organize its efforts to address

response needs in a coherent manner.

Factors Influencing Community Resilience

In an attempt to answer the question of what creates or enhances the capacity of a

community to respond to disasters, resilience studies from various disciplines have been

reviewed. Based on the review of existing literature, there are six groups of factors that influence

community resilience. These include: (1) psychological factors; (2) infrastructural factors; (3)

socio-economic factors; (4) social-capability and social capital factors; (5) managerial and

organizational factors; and (6) cultural factors. These factors are believed to influence a

community’s ability to respond to and recover from disasters.

Psychological Factors

Psychological factors that may affect resilience are sense of community (also known as a

sense of belonging and place attachment), problem-focused coping style, and self- or collective

efficacy (Tobin, 1999; Paton and Johnston, 2001). Paton et al. (2001) tested these variables with

members of a New Zealand community that experienced volcanic eruptions in 1995 and 1996

and found that self-efficacy and coping style were significant predictors of resilience. Other

studies have found that a sense of community and place attachment were also a source of

29

resilience. For examples, Pooley et al. (2006) argues that a sense of community is a resource for

people in times of stress while Norris et al. (2008) argue that place attachment is essential for

community resilience because it ensures citizens’ efforts to revitalize a community. Research has

also shown that a sense of community and place attachment predicted community involvement in

the placement of a hazardous waste facility (Bachrach & Zautra, 1985) and influence the

involvement of farming communities in managing salinity hazards (Bishop et al., 2000).

Collective efficacy is also believed to have an influence on community resilience. In

disaster-psychological research, adaptive capacity is the ability of an individual to cope with

adversity whereas collective capacity is used to describe the ability of a group or a community to

deal with disaster. Paton and Tang (2008) explain that, at the individual level, adaptive capacity

is the ability of community’s members to draw upon resources and competences that already

exist within their community to confront, cope with, and adapt to the losses and disruption

created by hazard activity. Collective efficacy, on the other hand, is adaptive capacity of the

community as a whole. Collective efficacy can be thought of as a shared belief that a community

can effectively address disaster demands and improve their post-disaster lives through concerted

effort.

Collective efficacy has been tested and found to have an influence on community

resilience in Thailand. According to Paton and Tang (2008), the day-to-day experience of

confronting issues within normal community context over time can translate into a capacity to

confront more significant disaster consequences. This capacity, accumulated from their day-to-

day experience, increases community members’ shared belief that, through a concerted effort,

their community can effectively deal with the consequences of disasters, even in the absence of

any specific disaster preparedness programs.

30

Social-Capability and Social Capital Factors

In this dissertation, social-capability factors include community competence and resident

empowerment and engagement. Social capital factors include social support (also known as

reciprocal relationship, social support networks), the presence of voluntary or community

organizations (e.g., churches, temples, community groups and clubs) and their relationship with

societal-level institutions (e.g., local government offices, local emergency management agency,

businesses and other civic agencies). A community can be resilient if it is competent (Pooley et

al., 2006), has a high level of social support or social capital (Buckland and Rahman, 1999;

Rhinard and Sundelius, 2010; Buckle et al., 2003), and its members are actively involved and

participate in voluntary organizations (Childs, 2008) or activities aimed at addressing community

problems (Paton, 2006; Buckle, 2006; Buckle et al., 2003; Gilbert, 2010).

The first social-capability factor that may influence resilience is community competence.

Community competence can be thought of as the ability of community members to work

together to identify needs and determine ways to meet those needs (Pooley et al., 2006). A

competent community can be resilient in times of crisis because it is able to collaborate

effectively in identifying needs and issues, achieve a working consensus, agree on ways to

implement agreed-upon goals, effectively utilize, develop or obtain resources in the community.

In short, the capacity to cope with adversity is enhanced because a competent community is able

to provide social and psychological resources and is well organized to take collective actions

(Pooley et al., 2006). Other researchers also support this argument. For example, drawing upon

his research findings, Cook argues that high competent communities can respond better to

environmental threats. Highly competent communities in this context are one that not only have

31

high level of place attachment, but also high utilization of community processes such as

attendance at community meetings, rallies, and petitions (Cook as cited in Pooley et al., 2006).

The ability of a community to empower its members and encourage them to participate in

disaster management activities also has implications for community resilience. Resident

empowerment helps the community to realize its goal of managing hazard consequences. Paton

(2006) explains that the community will achieve its goal in managing risk if the societal

institutions (e.g., civic agencies, emergency planners) possess an organizational culture that

embraces the value of empowering communities. Through this empowering process, decisions

and actions are translated in ways that support bottom-up, community-led initiatives.

Empowerment can also be a source of community resilience during response phase. Paton (2006)

argues that a community’s adaptive capacity during this phase reflects the capacity of its

members to work with others to plan and execute tasks. Thus, the degree to which emergency

response agencies possess an organizational culture that espouses community empowerment

(e.g., developing mechanisms for mobilizing and coordinating community volunteers to assist

recovery efforts) is a key to realizing the benefit of collective capacity.

A similar argument is also found in Buckle et al. (2003). They argue that empowerment

of local people and their communities to participate in planning and decision making make any

decision to be neither top-down nor bottom-up but a combination of these, which reflects a

genuine relationship or partnership that may enhance resilience. Inclusiveness of all stakeholders

in planning and decision-making processes also creates trust, which is also important to

organizing a cohesive action/effort to adapt to disaster consequences. Buckle et al. (2003)

suggest that community resilience requires the presence of high levels of trust and social capital

within networks and across networks. Thus, it is important to put in place an active program that

32

restricts conflict and to generate mutual respect and understanding among various actors. Finally,

Paton (2006) notes that participation in identifying shared problems and collaborating with

others to develop and implement solutions to resolve them engenders the development of several

resilience competencies such as collective efficacy, action coping, and community competence.

Social capital is also well documented as having effects on community resilience

(Buckland and Rahman, 1999; Rhinard and Sundelius, 2010; Buckle et al., 2003). In this

dissertation, social capital factors encompass social support, citizen volunteering, the presence of

voluntary or community organizations (e.g., churches, temples, community groups and clubs)

and their relationship with societal-level institutions (e.g., local government offices, local

emergency management agency, businesses and other civic agencies).

Social support, also known as reciprocal social support, social support networks, social

networks, community support, or networks, can be one of resilient factors (Paton and Johnston,

2001; Paton, 2006; Jang and Wang, 2009; Cottrell, 2006; Buckle, 2006; Buckle et al., 2003).

Paton (2006) argues that to be resilient, a community needs to have individual, community, and

societal/institutional resources required to support adaptation. Reciprocal social support is one of

these community-level resources that a community needs to have in times of disasters. Paton

(2006) also adds that the quality of reciprocal relationship between the community and the

societal-level institutions also determine whether rebuilding enhances the quality of community

life after a disaster and lays the foundation for future resilience. Although this variable is

believed to have influence on the ability to adapt to hazard consequences, its predictability is still

unsure. For example, while Paton and Johnston (2001) argue that social support is a predictor of

community resilience, Paton et al. (2001) tested this variable using longitudinal data from

members of a New Zealand community who experienced volcanic eruptions in 1995 and 1996

33

but did not find any significant support. Thus, it is interesting to examine the influence on this

factor in other contexts.

Citizen volunteering, voluntary and community organizations also play an important role

in promoting community’s ability to adapt to the consequences of hazards. Childs (2008)

conducted a research on volunteerism in Japan and found that neighborhoods that are organized

to help other people in the community are sources of resilience. Neighborhood groups such as

“tonari-gumi” and “Chonaikai” perform a function of neighborhood watch in both rural and

urban communities in Japan. The efforts of these neighborhood groups foster mutual help within

the partnering groups. Childs (2008) argues that neighborhood groups, or what he calls new

volunteerism, increase resilience in Japan because they strengthen social networks and

community cohesion at the local level.

Not only the existence of voluntary and community organizations (such as churches,

temples, and clubs) that is important to creating community’s adaptive capacity, the role of the

relationship between these community organizations with societal-level institutions (such as

local emergency response agencies, local government offices, businesses, and other civic

agencies) cannot be overlooked. Paton (2006) argues that to be resilient, a community not only

requires the availability of individual, community, and societal/institutional resources to support

adaptation, it also needs to have the mechanisms that facilitate interaction within and between

these levels in ways that promote cohesive action to enhance adaptive capacity, minimize

disruption, and facilitate growth. In this view, an interaction between all constituent parts is

important to building a community’s ability to respond to and recover from disasters. That is, the

quality of reciprocal relationship between the community and the societal-level institutions

determine whether rebuilding will enhance the quality of community life after disasters and lay

34

the foundations for future resilience (Paton, 2006). Buckle (2006) also adds that partnerships

(between agencies, community groups and private enterprise) facilitate innovation and build

shared knowledge, experience, and resources, which are valuable for creating adaptive capacity.

The more recent research also supports the above argument. For example, Gilbert (2010)

argues that community resilience is ability to “maintain collective life in a continually disrupted

situation” (p. 190). Maintaining collective life in an extended time of crisis requires active and

continued efforts from both governmental actors and nongovernmental organizations. Economic

actors (especially in communication, energy, transport, refuse removal, distribution of consumer

goods, circulation of liquidities, etc.), local authorities, organizations in charge of social action

and so on, are all important in crisis management (Gilbert, 2010). In short, community resilience,

or ability to maintain collective life in an enduring crisis, requires the recognition of the capacity

of various sectors of civil society such as nonprofit associations, community organizations, trade

unions and the like to participate in and contribute to the crisis management. Thus, interaction of

actors at all levels and in all sectors is important to effective disaster response and recovery.

Managerial and Organizational Factors

Managerial and organizational factors in this dissertation refer to disaster management

plans and practices (e.g., mitigation practices), policies that address disaster needs, leadership

and competent emergency professionals/workers, ability to maintain a shared vision about risk,

preparedness (including availability of resources and regular training of emergency workers and

professionals), cooperation, learning and communication. These managerial and organizational

capabilities are also believed to enhance community resilience.

Local leaders can be the promoters of community resilience (Buckle et al., 2003; Paton

and Auld, 2006; Boin, 2010). Boin (2010) suggests that a system or society is resilient when it is

35

capable of rapidly recombining available tools and resources in a flexible and creative way. The

ability to recombine these tools and resources will enable the system to recover and reconstruct

in the wake of a severe, life-threatening event. Boin (2010) argues that social bonds between the

community’s members and their trust in societal institutions (e.g., political parties, local

government, the president, the media, the judiciary, etc.) is the primary conditions under which

resilience can be emerged and public leaders are responsible for creating such conditions.

The job of local leaders in improving community resilience is to make sure that basic

response mechanisms are in place, potential responders are trained to act independently, all

potential crisis management actors exercise on a regular basis, planning is continuous, mobile

information-gathering units are in place, and administrative capacity exists to organize long-term

reconstruction efforts. Boin (2010) also argues that, after crisis has been settled and/or resilience

is organized, public leaders need to continue prepare for their role in future catastrophic response

by continually performing situational assessment, working with media, creating and nurturing

expert networks, and identifying capable partners because, as noted earlier, management of

catastrophes requires improvisation and flexibility in terms of both activities and resources.

Not only local leaders, emergency manager, professionals and workers are also important

to making the response system resilient. Paton and Auld (2006) argue that when disasters strike,

the responsibility for managing the impacts falls to emergency management agencies and the

professionals and volunteers that staff them. Thus, in the wake of disaster, community resilience

depends on the capacity of these agencies and their personnel “to make choices regarding the

allocation of resources to ameliorate anticipated and emergent demands, while working with

others to determine how best to action these decisions” (p. 267).Thus, both the local leaders and

emergency personnel play an important role in enhancing a community adaptive capacity.

36

Disaster management policies, plans and practices may also influence community

resilience. Manyena (2006) argues that Hurrican Katrina and Asian Tsunami 2004 showed us

that successful disaster policies promoted resilience as the stricken community can begin to

recover and provide assistance to victims in an extended time without outside aid. Birkland

(2010) supports this by arguing that hazard mitigation policies that enhance community

resilience are process-oriented, not project-oriented.

Birkland (2010) discusses the types of policy that promote resilience and argues that

policies that deal with disasters are political because distribution of resources to support disaster

management is mainly done through the government system. In political/policy perspective,

hazard mitigation measures can be viewed as policies and these policies can improve or

undermine the ability of a community to recover over the long run. Clearly speaking, project-

oriented mitigations, such as levees or floodwalls, could negatively affect community resilience

in the long run. These project-oriented mitigation works may protect the community from an

estimated flood level. However, if the flooding exceeds such an estimated level, a catastrophic

failure would occur. In this sense, project mitigation provides robustness not resilience and can

make the community more vulnerable in the long run.

The hazard mitigation policy that promotes resilience is process-oriented. Birkland

(2010) argues that process mitigation such as land-use planning removes vulnerable property

from hazard-prone areas and increases resilience because it can reduce the amount of damage

(compared to damage as a result of no mitigation measures undertaken and if a catastrophic

failure of a robust system occurs). In addition, by engaging people and community institutions

more directly than a project-oriented mitigation can do, process-oriented mitigation measures can

37

create knowledgeable and supportive communities that understand hazards to which they are

exposed and find the ways to reduce their vulnerability and improve resilience.

Another kind of policy that is believed to promote resilience is sustainable mitigation

policy. Sustainable hazard mitigation is a kind of policy that champions environmental quality,

quality of life, local resiliency and responsibilities for disaster, sustainable local economies,

ecosystems and resources preservations, and a consensus building approach of engaging all

stakeholders in mitigation planning activities (Schneider, 2006). Schneider (2006) argues that

resilience of a sustainable community can be facilitated through six basic tools of hazard

mitigation, which include land use planning, building codes, insurance, warnings, engineering,

and hazard relevant technologies. This view is a bit different from Birkland’s in a sense that it

also argues for the contribution of engineering project mitigation to community’s adaptive

capacity.

Preparedness can be another managerial/organizational factor that promotes resilience

(Kendra and Wachtendorf, 2003; Paton et al., 2006; Birkland, 2010). Preparedness involves such

activities as resource allocation, plan making and evaluation, emergency exercising, personnel

training and public education (Schwab et al., 2007). An empirical study on resilience of response

organizations after the 9/11 terrorist attacks conducted by Kendra and Wachtendorf (2003)

revealed that regular training, frequent drills and exercises that often involved mayor, emergency

management workers, and departmental representatives in the EOC organization had developed a

capacity for adaptive behavior, one element of resilience that was not dependent on either

specific physical facilities or specific technological systems. Other preparedness activities also

play an important role in promoting resilience. The same research also found that prior meeting

and conference created pre-established personal relationship among emergency managers,

38

professionals or workers which, in turn, enhances community resilience (Kendra and

Wachtendorf, 2003).

Preparedness measures also link to the capacity for self-reliance and adaptation. Paton et

al. (2006) argue that under disaster circumstances where people may be isolated from external

assistance and have limited access to normal community and societal resources and functions for

several days, the capacity of the people to adapt to disaster impacts depends on how well they are

prepared (e.g., how much knowledge of hazard impacts they have and the protective measures

and resources they put in place to assist their adaptation) and their ability to rely on their own

capacity and resources. Protective measures can reduce the risk of damage and injury whereas

self-reliance (as characterized by having resources) facilitate coping with the temporary

disruption that accompanies hazard activity. Put simply, if the community members take

protective measures and have their own resources available for use in times of crises, the

adaptive capacity (another term of resilience) can be enhanced. Birkland (2010) also adds that if

community members are prepared by having the proper response capacity, health and safety

facilities, and equipment, recovery time (from the impact phase to normalcy) can be shortened.

In this sense, preparedness influences resilience.

Cooperation can be another source of community resilience because it not only provides

coordination and resource distribution, but also build trust and social capital. Rhinard and

Sundelius (2010) argue that in a catastrophic event, the capacity to cooperate across borders is an

important precondition for resilience of all types of social system (e.g., communities, cities,

regions, nations). Unlike those who value self-reliance and availability of resources within the

community as a source of adaptive capacity (e.g., Paton et al., 2006; Jang and Wang, 2009), this

political/international relations perspective assumes that a complex crisis such as Hurricane

39

Katrina can easily outstrip the coping capacity of a single social system. Thus, in such a complex

crisis, an important source of resilience is the capacity to draw in necessary resources from

outside the jurisdiction and to incorporate and deploy these resources. To draw in external

resources to support its coping capacity, the affected social system must be able to cooperate

with other jurisdictions and gain not only managerial resources, but also technical expertise,

actionable intelligence, emotional support, and others.

Rhinard and Sundelius (2010) suggest that cooperation provides resilience in three ways.

First, it provides effective coordination, which in turn, promotes community resilience in three

ways: improving communication; leading to converging attitudes and changed behaviors so as to

improve decision making across borders under times of stress; and improving policy

implementation. Second, it improves resource distribution, which is critical to resilient system.

For a community to be resilient in times of complex crises, the quick distribution of resources

and materials to address disaster demands and resolve a potential disturbance before it happens is

required. Cooperation with external and cross-border authorities can be an effective tool for

managing crisis because it helps improve the movement and distribution of resources to where

and when they are needed. It also helps to ensure the distribution of intellectual resources,

meaning information and intelligence that can help a social system to make sense of an

impending development which, in turn, promotes resilience of response system. Finally,

cooperation builds trust and nurtures social capital, which is another important source of

resilience.

Learning and communication (Comfort et al., 2010; Buckle et al., 2003) may also

promote resilience. Comfort et al. (2010) examine resilience of a complex adaptive system (an

intergovernmental crisis management system) and argue that cognition is central to increasing

40

resilience in the capacity of communities to manage recurring risk and to respond to and recover

from disasters. Effective intergovernmental crisis management or a coherent response system

depends on a cumulative sequence of decisions. There are four steps of this decision sequence:

detection of risk; recognition and interpretation of risk for the intermediate context;

communication of risk to multiple organizations in a wider region; and self-organization and

mobilization of a collective, community response system to reduce risk and respond to danger.

Each of these steps involves searching for and exchanging of information across response

organizations in all sectors and at all levels. This process of searching for and exchanging of

information creates a shared vision of risk (a common consensus on incident management

strategies or a common operating picture among decision makers or various response

organizations) which, in turn, helps mobilize a coherent response to disasters. In this sense,

learning and communication are critical to effective crisis management (complex adaptive

system) (Comfort et al., 2010).

Cultural, Value and Local Knowledge Factors

Some scholars argue that local knowledge, experience, value, and culture also influence

the ability of a community to adapt to hazard consequences. A well-known study of the cultural

aspect of community resilience is a study of the Hakka Spirit in Taiwan in the context of the 921

Earthquake in 1999 (Jang and LaMendola, 2006; Jang and Wang, 2009). Jang and LaMendola

(2006) look at cultural influence on community response and recovery. They collected

qualitative data using in-depth interview and direct observations from residents in Tung Shih

Township, Taiwan, who experienced the 921 Earthquake in 1999. Their study showed that the

Hakka Spirit played a key role in resilience of Tung Shih residents. The results from cross-case

analysis emerged the same themes. Participants from each group shared the same opinion on

41

how the Hakka people were able to cope with the quake and recover quickly. The Hakka

characteristics that create resilience among these victims include: being determined; persistent;

well-organized; self-reliant; positive thinking; hard-working; and flexible. The works of Jang and

LaMendola (2006) and Jang and Wang (2009) are among the very first studies that investigated

the influence of culture and local values on community resilience. Other factors similar to culture

such as local adaptive strategies, heritages, knowledge and experience are also believed to be the

building blocks for boosting resilience (Manyena, 2006).

Infrastructural Factors

Infrastructure and lifelines are also believed to affect community resilience. The

characteristics and quality of infrastructure may affect the ability of a community to respond to

and recover from a disaster. Cutter et al. (2008; 2010) refer to this as an infrastructural resilience

while Johnston et al. (2006) call this a physical resilience. Johnston et al. (2006) discuss how

hazards can produce impacts on the infrastructure, services, utilities and linkages that sustain

societal functions. They argue that the quality of lifelines can enhance or attenuate community

resilience. If the lifeline system of the community is robust, it is likely that the community can

continue core societal functions during and after the disaster. However, they caution that, in

addition to the high cost of this physical resilience, these physical environment and lifelines

could only contribute to societal resilience if they can be used by a community to adapt to hazard

consequences in ways that ensure its continued functioning. Thus, people and organizations

within the community must take steps to ensure their ability to utilize the infrastructure and

lifelines. Regular assessment and maintenance of these lifelines and infrastructure, together with

sustainable development, can contribute to a more resilient community (Johnston et al., 2006).

42

Socio-economic Factors

Socio-economic factors such as demographic characteristics are also discussed as having

an effect on resilience. In an attempt to define and measure resilience, Cutter et al. (2008) argue

that the demographic characteristics of a community can affect its level of social resilience.

Lahad (2008) also identifies demographic characteristics that make some people more vulnerable

or resilient than others. Lahad (2008) argues that the characteristics of families, individuals, or

households that tend to be less resilient, likely to suffer more and, thus, recover slowly include

families that are isolated, poor, older, dependent on others or members of a group, do not speak

the local language, homeless, illiterate, and loss their relatives or relatives become disabled. The

review of literature found that demographic characteristics have not often used to examine

community’s adaptive capacity. In fact, Buckle (2006) argues that resilience should not be

defined based on such demographic characteristics because not only resilience is context-specific

(suggesting that while one person/family/group is more resilient in one hazard and at one time,

this same person/family/group may be less resilient in another hazard and at another time), it is

also impossible to change some of these characteristics (e.g., age, gender, race). Thus, defining

and examining community resilience based on these demographic variables may not be

practically useful (Buckle, 2006). For these reasons, demographic characteristics are not the

focus of this dissertation.

In conclusion, empirical research on community or disaster resilience is diverse, multi-

faceted, multi-disciplinary, and still, in some respects, in its infancy. Thus, it is not surprising

that findings about factors generating community resilience are mixed and sometimes

inconsistent. For example, while some previous research noted that people’s sense of community

was an important factor promoting resilience, Paton et al. (2001) empirically tested this variable

43

in a volcanic eruption context in New Zealand but did not find any significant support. Other

variables have been hypothesized as having influences on community resilience but have not

been empirically tested. Some variables have been empirically tested but only in a context of

volcanic eruption and only in western countries. Therefore, identifying factors or circumstances

that influence community resilience is still an important mission of disaster researchers. This is

because, first of all, it is interesting to examine whether these variables, which were developed in

the contexts of western, individualist-driven countries, will be applicable or able to predict

community resilience in Asian countries such as Thailand, where the community is driven by

collectivist culture. It is also important to see whether the variables developed in a volcanic

eruption hazard will be applicable in the context of massive floods. These and other issues need

to be researched in different hazard and cultural contexts to not only test their predictability and

applicability, but also to gain more understanding about what makes a community resilient to the

consequences of disasters.

Summary of Chapter

This chapter illustrated how resilience is studied and defined by each academic

discipline. Different academic fields define and examine resilience in different ways. These

dissimilarities in the definitions and the studies of resilience stem from the different theoretical

foundations grounded in each discipline and the focus or orientation of each researcher. As a

result, resilience is a multifaceted concept that is not clearly defined. This chapter also provided

some tentative answers of what constitutes resilience at both individual and community levels.

Drawing on prior studies from various disciplines, the chapter identified six groups of resilience

factors. These include: psychological factors; infrastructural factors; socio-economic factors,

social-capability and social capital factors; managerial and organizational factors; and, finally,

44

cultural factors. Although these are theoretically believed to be factors that generate community

resilience, few of them have been empirically tested, and most of those that have been tested

were examined in western, developed nations. Thus, there is still a need to reexamine those

factors in other settings and different contexts.

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CHAPTER 4

METHODOLOGY


This chapter describes the research design, provides reasons and justifications for

employing qualitative research methods, and presents information regarding procedures for

participant selection and methods of data collection. In addition, information about the

Institutional Review Board (IRB) application process and related issues pertaining to the

protection of using human subjects in the research are also presented. The chapter concludes by

describing how interview data were coded and analyzed, which sets the stage for the subsequent

analysis chapters.

Overview of Qualitative Research

Qualitative research methods are used in this research on community resilience.

Qualitative research is also known as field research (Singleton and Straits, 2005), case study

research (Yin, 2003), ethnography, Chicago School research, or nonquantitative methods

(Phillips, 2002). Unlike quantitative research models that seek to create knowledge in a

contained manner, qualitative research takes a holistic approach, which is reflexive and process-

driven, to generating knowledge (Hesse-Biber and Leavy, 2006). Qualitative research employs a

variety of data collection strategies. These include interviews, observations, documents, visual

records (Phillips, 2002), content analysis and focus groups (Hesse-Biber and Leavy, 2006). In

terms of data analysis, Phillips (2002) suggests that data analysis in qualitative research can be

described as “a process of searching for patterns and themes in the data” (p. 194). Qualitative

researchers interpret data by looking for themes grounded in respondents’ words. Thus, data in

the form of interview transcripts are analyzed by developing themes or thematic categories so

46

that the researcher can extract the meaning from these qualitative data (Hesse-Biber and Leavy,

2006).

Qualitative Methods and Disaster Research

Qualitative methods have been used since the early days of research in the disaster field

and continue to be popularly used today. In fact, the first disaster research conducted by Prince

in 1920 utilized qualitative research methods (Stallings, 2002). Since disasters often challenge

communities in unexpected ways and produce unanticipated consequences, qualitative methods

help researchers capture human behavior at its most open and realistic moments. Stallings (2002)

argues that qualitative methods, such as field research, allow disaster researchers to collect data

related to backstage and realistic behavior of humans. These data obtained from the field

research are potentially useful for the researchers to build theories of human behavior in

disasters.

Qualitative methods also provide for the opportunity to identify new research questions

that are more relevant and allow new ideas and findings to emerge. Stallings (2002) explains

that, because the procedure for qualitative research is flexible, disaster researchers can capture

new ideas and allow fresh perspectives to emerge from the data being collected. In addition,

because qualitative research takes a naturalistic approach of inquiry, an approach that

“acknowledges the existence of multiple realities, holistic investigation, the mutual influence of

researcher and respondent and the use of thick, rich description to form a context for

understanding” (Erlandson et al. as cited in Stallings, 2002, p. 202), researchers can follow new

and interesting questions that might emerge and alter their research design to better fit the

situations/circumstances during the course of field research. This would allow for new and rich

47

theoretical insights. For all these reasons, qualitative research becomes a major method for

disaster inquiry.

Qualitative Research in Community Resilience

Qualitative methods have been widely used in research on community resilience. The

work of Tobin and Whiteford (2002) is among the very first studies of resilience using

qualitative methods. Tobin and Whiteford (2002) used Tobin’s (1999) conceptual framework of

community resilience to understand the response and recovery effort of officials and residents of

three small communities experiencing volcanic eruption in Ecuador. Data were collected using

interviews and surveys with government officials, relief workers, leaders and community

members at three and eight months after the initial eruption. Another qualitative study on

resilience was conducted in the United States. Kendra and Wachtendorf (2003) examined

resilience of response organization after its destruction in the World Trade Center attack. In this

research, data were collected through systematic field observations of key planning meetings and

on-scene disaster operations, supplemented with note taking, photographing and sketching of

relevant evidence, collecting numerous documents produced by local, state, and federal agencies

and other informal organizations.

Many more recent empirical research on community resilience also utilized qualitative

approach. Cottrell (2006) used a grounded theory approach to study women’s preparedness as

one form of resilience in northern Australia. Data were collected using focus group discussions,

telephone surveys and individual interviews. Pooley et al. (2006) used a case study approach to

examine how individual and community characteristics influence vulnerability, the role of

resilience factors and how interactions between individual- and community-level factors

influence post-disaster outcomes (the research site was in northwest Australia). Jang and

48

LaMendola (2006) and Jang and Wang (2009) used in-depth interview, focus groups and direct

observation to assess cultural influence on disaster resilience in Taiwan. Finally, Berke et al.

(2008) used semi-structured interviews to collect data from eleven local informants in the south

of Thailand to examine the human-ecological dimension of disaster resilience in tsunami-

stricken communities. This dissertation follows in the tradition of these previous qualitative

studies to examine resilience in the communities affected by Thailand Great Floods in 2011.

Participant Selection

To examine disaster resilience of Nakhonsawan City Municipality, 36 participants from

various organizations and sectors were recruited to participate in the study. Participants were

categorized into four groups according to their roles in the flood response. Participants included

in the first group are local leaders who have direct responsibilities to respond to disasters that

occur within the administrative boundary of Nakhonsawan City Municipality. Participants

included in this group are Nakhonsawan City Municipality mayor, deputy mayors, municipal

clerks, and other top-level municipality administrators. During the flood crisis, these people were

expected to take a leadership role in directing overall response operations, making decisions,

organizing response efforts and mobilizing resources.

The second group of participants included emergency professionals and/or workers.

Emergency workers in this dissertation refer to people who, by their professional positions or

status, have direct responsibilities or are assigned to be first responders during the response

phase. Participants in this group included the Municipal Disaster Prevention and Mitigation

manager and officers. These personnel were responsible for executing disaster management

policies initiated by office of the municipality. Also included in this group were emergency

workers (daily workers). When the floods hit Nakhonsawan City Municipality, emergency

49

workers and other lower-level employees such as street cleaners were assigned to flood response

efforts. These people worked in shifts to lay sandbags, drain water, and other tasks to prevent the

floodwater from entering the city. The residents of Nakhonsawan City Municipality called these

lower-level employees “Orange and Blue Angels” during the flood crisis to honor their hard

works (and because most of these employees are females who often wore orange and blue

uniforms).

The third group of participants included volunteers. Volunteers in this dissertation refer

to people who are not directly responsible for flood response but volunteer to participate in

response operations. During the flood crisis, many groups of residents, community and religious

organizations, clubs, business owners in the community’s commercial areas, and people from

other sectors within the city municipality offered helps in different ways. Some of them

participated in sandbagging and draining efforts. Some of them provided food and drinks to

emergency workers and some groups provided information to the people through radio and

social media (e.g., Facebook page).

Participants included in the last group were called supporters. In this dissertation,

supporters refer to provincial- and regional-level organizations that provided support (both

technical, expertise, and other resources) to the city municipality upon its requests. Examples of

this group are Nakhonsawan Provincial Office, provincial and regional disaster mitigation and

prevention office, and regional military base. Once they received requests from Nakhonsawan

City Municipality, these institutions provided both technical assistance and resources for flood

response effort. By categorizing participants into these four groups, various perspectives on

resilience of Nakhonsawan City Municipality can be gained and triangulating data obtained from

these four groups of participants can be achieved.

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Other criteria for selecting participants are: (1) participants must be18 years of age or

older; (2) they must be residents of Nakhonsawan City Municipality or work in any

organizations located within Nakhonsawan City Municipality; and (3) they must be involved in

the flood response in Nakhonsawan City Municipality in 2011. Snowball sampling was used to

reach and recruit information-rich participants for this study. Snowball sampling, another type of

referral technique, uses a process of chain referral. The procedures involve locating a target

population and, then, identifying initial respondents. These initial respondents are asked to

provide names and addresses of other members of the target population, who are then asked to

name others. This sampling procedure is suitable when members of target population often know

each other (Singleton and Straits, 2005). Snowball sampling in this research started with

identifying initial respondents in each group of participants (leader, emergency

professional/worker, volunteer, and supporter). Then, each of these initial respondents was asked

to provide names and phone numbers of others. This sampling procedure resulted in 28

participants for personal, one-on-one in-depth interviews. Additionally, in terms of participant

selection for a focus group interview, purposive sampling was used to recruit participants.

Purposive sampling is good for selecting only information-rich participants for the study (Patton,

1990). In this study, neighborhood leaders and members who actively participated in a

cooperative effort formed by the three strong neighborhoods were recruited to attend the focus

group interview. By employing this sampling procedure, eight participants were recruited to

participate in a focus group interview.

Data Collection

Strategies for collecting qualitative data vary. Approaches include: in-depth interviews;

oral history; focus group interviews; ethnography (observations); content analysis and

51

unobtrusive methods (documents and records); photography/videography or visual techniques

(analyzing pictures); and a combination of these methods (Hesse-Biber and Leavy, 2006;

Phillips, 2002).

In this study, in-depth interviews and a focus group interview were used as the primary

strategies for collecting data. Interviewing is the most common strategy for collecting qualitative

data in disaster research (Stallings, 2002). Hesse-Biber and Leavy (2006) suggest that in-depth

interviewing is particularly useful “when the researcher has a particular topic he or she wants to

focus on and gain information about from individuals” (p. 120). Since the nature of in-depth

interviewing is unstructured or semi-structured (Singleton and Straits, 2005), interview guides

were developed to keep the interviews focused. These interview guides were designed according

to the topic of investigation (factors or circumstances that influence community resilience) and

themes that found from the review of the literature.

Data collection for this research occurred between June 2, 2012 and June 30, 2012. The

researcher reached the research site (Nakhonsawan City Municipality) on June 1, 2012. Upon

arrival, he made two visits to the deputy municipal clerk, who provided great support by

referring him to the mayor and several other respondents within the office of the municipality.

This deputy municipal clerk also referred respondents from other organizations to the researcher.

She also offered an opportunity to the researcher to participate in a few important events such as

the municipality’s meeting with Thailand’s Prime Minister and her meeting with one

neighborhood to discuss a community saving fund. Attending these two important events was

very productive because the researcher got a chance to conduct interviews with many

respondents participating in both events. Another visit was made to the provincial governor to

52

formally report his arrival. Another reason for this visit was to inform him about research

activities that would be undertaken here during this whole month and request his support.

The first three weeks of the field trip were dedicated to in-depth, personal interviews.

With the help of the first respondent (deputy municipal clerk), the researcher was able to identify

several potential research participants and, finally, a total of 28 respondents were recruited to

participate in the in-depth interviews. Those who participated in the in-depth, personal interviews

included the mayor, deputy mayors, municipal clerks, municipal department directors, municipal

employees/workers, provincial governor, directors and officers from many provincial

departments, chief police officer, civil defense volunteers (CVD), and representatives from non-

profit and faith-based organizations. Participants were asked for permission to conduct the

interviews and each was provided a copy of an informed consent form. All interviews were

audiotaped (with the permission of the participants). During the interviews, participants were

free to ask questions regarding this study. Each interview took about 30 minutes to 2 hours. Data

obtained from these in-depth, personal interviews were used to identify factors contributing to

the resilience of the local government.

A focus group interview was also used in this research to collect data for resilience of

neighborhoods. Focus group interviewing is a process of collecting data from multiple

respondents at one time. This data collection strategy allows a researcher to discover key issues,

ideas, and concerns related to the topic of interest from multiple respondents at once because, in

a focus group, they are interviewed together (Hesse-Biber and Leavy, 2006). Focus group

interviewing is also commonly used in qualitative studies of disasters. For examples, Jang and

Wang (2009) conducted a focus group interview with eight information rich participants to

determine how culture influenced resilience of people affected by the 921 Earthquake in Taiwan.

53

The focus group interview for this dissertation was conducted during the last week of June. With

the help of deputy municipal clerk, the researcher was connected with a representative of the

target neighborhood. This person helped the researcher identify other neighborhood members

who were actively involved in response operations in 2011. With this help, the researcher

recruited eight respondents to participate in the focus group interview. These eight respondents

were from three adjacent neighborhoods, which, during the flood last year, formed a cooperative

response effort. They were, of course, actively involved in all activities during the response. Data

obtained from this focus group were used to identify factors contributing to the resilience of

neighborhoods.

Although in-depth and focus group interviews were mainly used in this study, other

strategies for data collection, such as content analysis of documents and photographs, were also

used in order to triangulate the data obtained. Hesse-Biber and Leavy (2006) suggest that the

texts and objects that groups of people produce are embedded with larger ideas those groups

have shared. The benefits of content analysis of texts and photographs are two-fold. First, the

data are noninteractive, and, second, they exist independent of the research. This allows the

researcher to obtain and analyze the data that are naturalistic and authentic (Hesse-Biber and

Leavy, 2006). In this study, textual and visual documents produced by Nakhonsawan City

Municipality, Nakhonsawan Province, local newspaper, and other local organizations were

collected and analyzed. The use of multiple data collection methods and sources would provide

for triangulating the resulting data. That is, it is possible to compare the information collected

from one source with other sources, which can also serve as a means of checking for accuracy

and validity of the data (Kendra and Wachtendorf, 2003).

54

Data Coding and Analysis

This dissertation employed an inductive approach to data coding and analysis. In this

approach, predefined set of coding categories are not used; rather, the researcher is required to

immerse him or herself in the data (text) until themes, concepts, or dimensions of concepts arise

from the data.

To begin the process, data from the in-depth interviews and the focus group interview

were transcribed. Data transcription started on July 6 and was finished on August 20, 2012

(approximately two months). In this transcription process, not only the key passages, quotes, or

issues were summarized, but instead the entire data were transcribed verbatim because some

important contexts or conditions that might be related to the major findings could be obtained.

Transcripts of these data were read carefully and corrections for any errors were performed as

appropriate. After transcription was completed, transcribed data were translated from Thai to

English. This translation process took about one month (from August 21 to September 25, 2012).

After transcription and translation were done, the data analysis processes began. Data

analysis started with open coding to obtain initial or literal codes that emerged in each interview

transcript (Strauss, 1990). These are referred to as literal or initial codes because most of these

words (or codes) appear within the text and are usually descriptive codes (Hesse-Biber and

Leavy, 2006). These initial or literal codes obtained from this step are used for the next step of

coding (focused or selective coding). The process of open coding involved literally reading every

line of every transcript, condensing data into manageable segments (such as lines, sentences, or

paragraphs), and then carefully coding each of these segments (Hesse-Biber and Leavy, 2006).

When performing open coding, the researcher was guided by the following types of sensitizing

questions:

55

• What is going on?

• What are people doing?

• What is the person saying?

• What do these actions and statements take for granted? (Charmaz as cited in Hesse-Biber

and Leavy, 2006, pp. 348-349).

Open coding took about a month to be completed (from September 25 to October 18,

2012).

The next step was to perform a selective coding (Strauss, 1990) or focused coding

(Hesse-Biber and Leavy, 2006) to create analytical or conceptual codes. This process involved

reexamining initial themes obtained from open coding to determine what were the core themes or

categories and what could be considered subcategories. The next was to consider the links

between these categories and, finally, to systematically relate these subcategories to the core

categories or themes. Memo writing and detailed quotation were used to assist in completing this

process and helped to clarify each of the analytical codes. This focused coding is the process of

transforming the more literal to the conceptual level of analysis (Hesse-Biber and Leavy, 2006).

This focused coding took about one week to be completed (from October 22 to October 29,

2012). Data analyses resulted in eight conceptual themes that represented factors for resilience of

local government (Nakhonsawan City Municipality) and eight conceptual themes that described

factors constituting response capacity of the three strong neighborhoods.

IRB Process

Since human subjects were interviewed for this study (and subjects were audiotaped), an

application was submitted to and approved by the University of North Texas Institutional

Review Board. Also required were the major professor’s and investigating student’s certificates

56

of completing of the course “Protecting Human Research Participants” provided by the National

Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Extramural Research. Also submitted to the IRB were the

interview guides designed for collecting data for this study. All of the questions in the interview

guides were open-ended to allow participants to answer the questions of interest in their own

words. The questions contained in the interview guide were developed based on the review of

extant literature or studies on disaster resilience from various perspectives and fields of study.

The interview guides for this study can be found in Appendix A.

Summary of Chapter

This chapter provided an overview of qualitative research, defining it, contrasting it with

quantitative research, and describing the benefits of using qualitative methods. It then provided a

brief history of disaster research, emphasizing how qualitative methods have been used

extensively in disaster research. In addition, since it is argued in this dissertation that qualitative

research is the most commonly used method in resilience studies, the chapter provided some

examples of prior resilience studies that employed qualitative methods to collect and analyze

data. Finally, the chapter described in detail how data for the study were gathered, transcribed,

and analyzed. Chapter 5 presents findings from the analysis related to the resilience of local

government, and Chapter 6 presents findings on the resilience of neighborhoods.

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CHAPTER 5

RESULTS 1: RESILIENCE OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT


This chapter examines factors that generate resilience for local government. Specifically,

it seeks to explore what contributed to the ability of the Office of Nakhonsawan City

Municipality, as a leading response organization, to deal with the 2011 flooding. As will be seen,

the ability of local government to respond to such a natural disaster is attributable to several

factors.

Flooding in Nakhonsawan City Municipality in 2011 was one of the worst in its history.

All areas within its administrative authority were inundated. Nakhonsawan City Municipality is

very important to the province because it is a provincial hub for administration, business,

transportation and education. Most of the regional and provincial government agencies,

including the office of the province, the office of city municipality and other provincial

departments are located in this city municipality. It is also the place where business activities

take place and with the large population, it is the biggest city of this province. Because it is

strategically important to the province, flooding last year in this city municipality was responded

to by multiple organizations. The main response organization was the Office of Nakhonsawan

City Municipality. Other government agencies, such as the office of the province, other

departments, and voluntary and nonprofit organizations, also actively supported the operations.

Thus, chief officers and personnel from these organizations were recruited to participate in the

study to gain multiple insights about what created disaster response capacity, or resilience, of this

city municipality. Based upon analyses of the transcribed interviews, this chapter discusses eight

themes or factors that contributed to the resilience of local government. These include: resources

58

for resilience; managerial adaptability; crisis leadership; quality workforce; knowledge sharing

and learning; organizational preparedness; organizational integration; and sectoral integration.

Figure 7 shows factors for resilience of local government.

Figure 7. Factors for resilience of local government

Resources for Resilience

Resources are required for a community to be resilient. Paton (2006) identifies three

types of resources a community needs to support its adaptation. They include: individual;

community; and society/institutional resources. In this research, resources for resilience are

described in different ways. Results from analyses of interview data revealed that Nakhonsawan

City Municipality relied on four types of resources when responding to the flood crisis in 2011.

They included: internal-governmental; internal-non-governmental; external-governmental; and

external-non-governmental resources. The following typology (Figure 8) illustrates resources for

resilience that were available for the Office of Nakhonsawan City Municipality to use in its

response operation.

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Figure 8. Resources used by Nakhonsawan City Municipality in flood response.

This typology emerged from respondents’ answers to questions in the interview guide

dealing with how they handled the situation, the availability of resources, types and sources of

supports they received, the problems they faced, and the solutions they used to overcome those

challenges. Resources here include equipment, materials, facilities, personnel, money, technical

supports, food and other commodities necessary for flood response that were available for

Nakhonsawan City Municipality. These resources belonged to the office of the city municipality

itself. Some belonged to other governmental and non-governmental organizations from both

within and outside the administrative boundary of Nakhonsawan City Municipality.

Internal-Governmental Resources

The first group of resources available for the Office of Nakhonsawan City Municipality

to use in response operations was identified as internal-governmental. These resources are

available in or provided by governmental organizations located within the city municipality’s

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administrative areas. In performing response tasks last year, in most cases the office of the city

municipality relied on its own resources. Chief officers and employees from the office of the city

municipality asserted that they were able to drain the floodwater quickly and successfully

responded to emerging problems because they had their own resources ready for use.

The first example of internal-governmental resources from the Office of Nakhonsawan

City Municipality that contributed to its resilience is the availability of municipal personnel (both

officers and workers). Some respondents noted that having enough workforces helped the Office

of Nakhonsawan City Municipality deal with flooding effectively. According to some

respondents, for example:

Another important thing was that we had enough people for flood response efforts. We had about 500 to 600 workers. Thus, we were able to mobilize our people very quickly at any time we wanted. The municipality has a large workforce and many departments. Each department has a number of workers who can be assigned to work during the crisis. For example, the Department of Public Works has a number of workers normally working as street cleaners, drainage workers, and gardeners. Because the municipality has enough workforces, it was so efficient in dealing with the flood. We [municipality’s Department of Public Health] have workers who take care of street cleaning in normal time. In flood crisis, these workers were assigned to help with filling and laying sandbags to reinforce our levees. Other respondents mentioned the importance of available financial resources, materials and

equipment:

We had enough…equipment, and materials necessary for the response. We also had our trucks and equipment ready for use whenever we wanted. We reserved 200 million baht per year for emergencies. Once crisis occurred, the mayor could use this money for response and recovery. We had enough money. It was our own money. We got materials, equipment and personnel.

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Many other participants also stated that the effective draining facilities available in the

municipality contributed so much to their successful response as they could drain the floodwater

very quickly compared to other cities. This can be also referred to as “physical resilience”

(Johnston et al., 2006) or “infrastructural resilience” (Cutter et al., 2008; 2010). According to

respondents:

We have good wastewater treatment systems and facilities. These facilities helped us drain water very quickly. We have 12 big draining pipes that were used to prevent water from entering the city. Once all the pipes were blocked, we used our underground pumps to drain the floodwater. We also used portable pumps to support our draining effort. We successfully dried the city within 2 weeks. This time we were able to drain water quickly because we had a good drainage system. Our underground water treatment facilities worked very well. I think our current infrastructural and waste water treatment systems enhanced our draining effort. Our underground waste water treatment facilities made it easier to drain water out of the city. They helped us dry the city more quickly. We had underground pumps so we were able to drain a lot of floodwaters each day. With the draining capacity of our underground pumping stations, water draining efforts went very well and city was dried rapidly only within a week.

The office of the municipality did not only rely on its own resources, internal-governmental

resources were also available in other governmental organizations located within the

Nakhonsawan City Municipality’s administrative areas. When the flood prevention systems (e.g.,

floodwall, levee) failed, letting an enormous volume of floodwater enter the city, the office of the

municipality and its municipal departments could not handle that crisis effectively with only its

own resources and capacity. Consequently, the office of the municipality contacted other

governmental agencies located in the municipal areas asking them to help. Thus, support in the

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form of various types of resources from other governmental agencies within the municipal areas

also contributed to its resilience. As one officer said:

In addition to having a good response plan, support from all other agencies in municipal areas was also another factor for the success. Dealing with massive flooding is not easy, especially when the force of flooding destroyed flood

prevention systems of the city. Thus, the ability to deal with it also depended on the ability of the

city in securing necessary resources from local partners. In the case of Nakhonsawan City

Municipality, other governmental agencies became important sources of assistance because they

were able to provide heavy-duty equipment and other tools that helped the municipality deal with

flooding more effectively. One respondent noted that:

When the floodwall failed at Bon Kai area, floodwater from the river flowed into the city suddenly. We could not do anything because the water was so deep and flowed very rapidly. With the equipment that we had at that time, we could not be able to help our people in that area to move their property and evacuate from the area, which was being flooded. We could not even be able to move sandbags to the scene to fix the broken floodwall. Fortunately, we asked the Regional III Military Base for help. They came with their heavy-duty equipment and big trucks. They helped us by moving sandbags to the scene to fix the floodwall, make new levee and helped the people to evacuate the inundated area.

Participants from the Office of Nakhonsawan City Municipality also added:

I felt thankful to the Provincial Marine Department for helping us by providing those hydraulic backhoe dredges. Without their help, our city might be flooded even longer than two weeks. I wanted to thank them for supporting us with providing and operating those hydraulic backhoe dredges. Sometimes the pumps that we had were not enough to drain the water. However, we borrowed some from other agencies such as the Provincial Office of Irrigation, the Provincial Office of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation.

In addition to heavy-duty equipment and tools, support from governmental organizations within

municipal areas came in the form of human resource for performing multiple response tasks.

Three participants stated:

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The military also made a great contribution to our response efforts. They helped us by providing truck taxis that transported people from one place to another, transporting food, water, and essential supplies to victims, entertaining our evacuees, preparing meals and ensuring safety and security within our 12 public shelters Since our medical personnel were not sufficient, the military hospital sent some military doctors and nurses to help us at the shelter. We were glad to receive support from several agencies. We also thanked police officers and military officers for making sure the shelter was safe and to ensure security.

Some agencies supported the municipality by providing utilities. One respondent stated:

We were not able to operate our normal production for about two days. So we contacted Provincial Waterworks Authority for help. They used firefighting trucks (equipped with tanks) to transport water to the people in all 12 shelters.

Another respondent noted:

Actually, I am very familiar with the Provincial Electricity Authority of Nakhonswan Province. I asked them to provide power to us in some important areas. After I called some of the chief officers there, they said that they were pleased to help us. They sent 60 officers from other districts and provinces to recover our electrical facilities and started to provide power in some commercial and residential areas again. With their help, we could still have power for use during the flood.

Finally, some local agencies even provided financial resource to the city municipality so it could

be able to get materials for the response. One participant said:

The provincial office supported us by allocating budget, providing crushed stone and sand for us to make and reinforce our levees. They also supported budget for buying food and essential supplies.

It should be noted here that financial resources supported by the provincial office often came

with some regulations that the city municipality, as a receiver of government’s financial

assistance, needed to be accountable for. The two important accountability mechanisms that

came with provincial assistance were the Finance Ministry’s Regulation on Advance Money for

Disaster Victim Reliefs B.E. 2546 and the Procedures for Disaster Victim Reliefs B.E. 2551.

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These two laws required that the city municipality, as a receiver of national government’s

financial assistance through the provincial office, had to report its spending of the assistance to

and closely coordinate with the Office of Nakhonsawan Province during the response.

Internal-Non-Governmental Resources

Another group of resources for resilience of the city municipality was provided by non-

governmental organizations or groups within Nakhonsawan City Municipality’s area. In times of

crisis when all people needed assistance at the same time, it was very challenging for

governmental agencies to serve needs of all those affected by the flood. However, a community

could be resilient if voluntary, faith-based, nonprofit organizations as well as groups of citizens

were actively involved in the response. Childs (2008) conducted research on citizen volunteering

in time of a crisis in Japan and found neighborhood groups, or what he called new volunteerism,

increased resilience in Japan because they strengthened social networks and community cohesion

at the local level. In line with findings from the previous research, this dissertation shows that

groups of citizens and other non-governmental organizations within municipal areas are

important sources for community resilience. As two participants stated:

We were so lucky last year because we received a lot of support from volunteers, clubs, foundations, and the people. These people were so quick. Whenever we needed help, they showed up very quickly at the sites or our office. Because of labor support from residents and volunteers, we were able to fix the levee every time it failed. Sometimes the levee failed at 1 am letting the water to enter that area. We could still see residents coming out to help us fix the levee.

One of the citizen groups or non-governmental organizations that contributed so much to the

success of the response was the Civil Defense Volunteer (CDV). Members of CDV became an

important source of labor for performing multiple response tasks. Some participants stated:

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Members of Civil Defense Volunteer were very important to our municipality. They organized a team to perform levee patrols. Each day and night members of this team watched over the levee in risky areas to make sure there was no leak. These volunteers were there in case if there were any leaks occurred, we could be informed quickly and equipment and workers needed for fixing the levee were mobilized in a timely manner. They also actively participated in an effort to fix the broken levee. They helped us lay sandbags. They were an important source of workforce that the municipality used in flood response effort. Members of Civil Defense Volunteer are important to our emergency response because the Provincial Office of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation has limited personnel to provide emergency services. Members of CDV played an important part in disaster response and recovery. They helped in search and rescue, protecting levee, laying sandbags, evacuating patients from hospitals and doing neighborhood patrols. We did not have any problem with this because if we needed help, we asked for more people from Nakhonsawan’s Civil Defense Volunteer. During the flood last year, we [CDV] did many things to help the municipality respond to it.

Faith-based organizations such as Buddhist temples also provided strong support to the

municipality. In most cases, temples were requested to serve as shelters and provide mass care to

evacuees. They provided accommodation, food, and stress relief services to evacuees. In

Nakhonsawan City Municipality, temples did these jobs very well not only because they had

enough resources but also because they have had experience of providing shelter and mass care

in the past. A respondent from one temple stated:

During the flood last year, our temple was assigned as a shelter for evacuees. The shelter was mainly operated by Nakhonsawan’s Community Development Department. We facilitated the operations and helped the Community Development Department with anything that they needed. Lots of people came to stay at this temple during the flood. This was because, first, we had abundance of food in our temple. Second, we had enough rooms and bedding supplies. Next, we have our own water reserve so when the municipality was not be able to provide water because its facilities were flooded, we did not run out of water supply.

Temples did not only serve physical needs of evacuees, they were also able to help evacuees

relieved their stress and reduce psychological impacts. The same respondent noted:

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We tried to take the best care of the people. Not only food, medicine, and essential supplies, we also tried to take care of their mind and reduce psychological impacts. Especially children, we did not want them to be stressed. Children could watch movies in the evening. We also had snacks for them. Adult evacuees took Buddhist lessons. They joined us in praying. They also listened to Buddhist lessons.

In addition to members of Civil Defense Volunteer and faith-based organizations, businesses and

residents within municipal areas also actively supported the operation. One respondent noted that

businesses provided tents, meals and dry food:

We borrowed some [tents] from businesses. When we ran out of food, we coordinated with businesses or private organizations to support us with meals.

Other respondents mentioned that residents and farmers provided equipment and labor supports:

We received support from farmers who let us borrowed their farming pumps. We got about 500-600 pumps from them and they got paid for gas and labor in return. We got all these farming tractors from the farmers. Farmers did not use them during the flood, so we borrowed these tractors from them and gave them some money in return.

One officer responded:

Another thing was support from all the people. I can still recall how much we received support from the people. Whenever the levee failed and the water leaked in, without asking for help, the residents, business employees, and nurses from nearby areas jumped in to help us protecting the city. It was an impressive picture that I will never forget. Our people did not hesitate to help whenever they saw us working on protecting our city.

Another respondent noted: People not only provided money, dry food and essential supplies, they also volunteered to work. Students from sport school and residents from nearby neighborhoods also came out and helped us place sandbags to protect the city. We had more than 1,000 volunteers each day. We had seen unity of the people at this time.

External-Governmental Resources

Resources that Nakhonsawan City Municipality used in the flood response in 2011also

came from other municipalities and provinces. This group of resources is identified as external-

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governmental because they were provided by governmental organizations located outside the

administrative boundary of Nakhonsawan City Municipality. These organizations included other

nearby municipalities, districts and sub-districts within Nakhonsawan Province, and

municipalities from other provinces in different regions. According to the interview, assistance

provided by these external municipalities did not come with any type of accountability

mechanism. Rather, it was based on the true willingness to help or the principle of normal

reciprocity. Resources obtained from these organizations enhanced the capacity of Nakhonsawan

City Municipality in responding to the flood. Some officers from the Office of Nakhonsawan

City Municipality stated:

We received a lot of support from several parties. Those whom we had helped in the past came to help us this time. Northern municipalities who were flooded earlier and received help from us such as Chiang Rai Municipality, Mae Sai Municipality and Uttaradit Municipality sent their employees and equipment to help us deal with this crisis. We were able to recover quickly because we received support from many organizations. This included northern municipalities such as Mae Sai Municipality, Chiang Rai Municipality, Petchaboon Municipality, Tak Municipality, and Kampangpet Municipality. These municipalities provided drinking water, dry food, and money. Other municipalities from different regions also contributed to our operations. Our good friends included Lam Pang Municipality from the north and Hat Yai Municipality from the south. They contacted me directly because they knew me. I had a network of municipal clerks across the country.

In addition, some municipalities sent their personnel and specialized equipment to help

Nakhonsawan City Municipality in performing specific tasks such as debris clearance and waste

disposal, safety and security in shelters, and medical services. Some municipal officers noted:

Fortunately, we received help from many other municipalities and sub-district administrative organizations from all over the country. Among others, Hat Yai Municipality from the south made the greatest contribution to our waste disposal effort. These municipalities provided us money, trucks and equipment, and personnel. Because of this great support from other municipalities and sub-district administrative organizations, we were able to clear out debris and wastes very quickly. Our waste disposal system returned to its normal operation within about a month or so.

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We also received support of police officers from other provinces such as Sukhothai Province, Tak Province, and Khampangpet Province. These police officers from other provinces supported our shelter safety and security mission and provided community crime patrol in some remote areas. We got support from a team of doctors from Chonburi Province. This team provided onsite services to people who did not leave their residences in remote areas.

External-Non-Governmental Resources

The last group of resources for resilience is called external-non-governmental. These

resources were provided by non-governmental organizations located outside Nakhonsawan City

Municipality. The importance of resources provided by this group of organizations was reflected

in personal interviews. Many respondents indicated that they were lucky to receive help from

people, individual volunteers/voluntary organizations, non-profit organizations and businesses

from outside Nakhonsawan City Municipality’s administrative area. These people and non-

governmental organizations often provided labor support needed for the flood response,

meals/dry food, commodities and, sometimes, equipment. External-non-governmental resources

often went to public shelters and, thus, enhancing shelter operations of Nakhonsawan City

Municipality. A volunteer in one temple that served as a shelter during the flood noted:

Clothes were also donated by the people from northern provinces, which were previously flooded. When the floodwater in their cities receded, they came to help us.

A monk from one temple which also served as a shelter added:

We also received support of 50 volunteers from Chaiyabhoom Province.

Other respondents noted the contribution of businesses and nonprofit organizations from outside

the Nakhonsawan City Municipality in providing meals for both workers and evacuees:

Business organizations such as CP Group also helped us by providing cooked meals for our employees and affected residents.

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CP Group provided us about 4,000-10,000 boxes of meal daily. We also got support from business and nonprofit organizations to provide meals to our evacuees such as Princess Pa Foundation, DTAC, and PTT.

As can be seen, Nakhonsawan City Municipality relied on multiple resources to respond

to the 2011 flooding. These include: internal-governmental; internal-non-governmental; external-

governmental; and external-non-governmental resources. Identifying resources in this way is

based on types of organizations (governmental or non-governmental) that provided such

resources and their locations (within or outside Nakhonsawan City Municipality’s administrative

boundary). Interviewees indicated that these resources contributed to their success in response.

Interview data also revealed that internal-governmental resources (e.g., municipality’s draining

facilities, equipment, materials and manpower) were used the most in city protection efforts (e.g.,

preventing water in the river from entering the city and draining floodwater out of the city) and

other response efforts. Internal-non-governmental resources (especially resident volunteers,

members of CDV) were mainly used as labor power in general response tasks such as search and

rescue, levee patrol, filling and laying sandbags, and aid distribution. External-governmental

resources obtained by other municipalities from different regions (e.g., technicians,

professionals, and specialized equipment) were mainly used in specific tasks such as debris

removal, waste disposal, medical services and safety and security in shelters. Finally, external-

non-governmental resources, which were obtained by groups of citizens, businesses and non-

profit organizations from outside the municipality (e.g., fresh and dry food, drinking water,

clothes and other commodities), were mainly used to support sheltering and mass care

operations.

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Managerial Adaptability

One factor that contributed to the success of Nakhonsawan City Municipality in dealing

with the flood crisis last year was managerial adaptability. Managerial adaptability is a

conceptual theme that emerged in data collected from personal, in-depth interviews with officers

from the Office of Nakhonsawan City Municipality and some other organizations. Managerial

adaptability describes the ability of organizations responding to the crisis last year (especially the

Office of Nakhonsawan City Municipality, as the leading response organization) to adapt the

ways of managing/utilizing resources and organizational management to fit the changed

circumstances created by such a disaster. Previous studies suggest that flexibility and

adaptability are two important qualities that an organization needs to have in order to bounce

back and perform tasks successfully in highly uncertain circumstances (Wildavsky as cited in

Bruijne et al., 2010, p. 22). Some scholars, such as Webb and Chevreau (2006), argue that

creativity and flexibility should be encouraged when a community deals with a crisis because

“unscripted activities, improvised behaviors, and emergent organizational structures” can

promote resilience of a response system (p. 67). Managerial adaptability of Nakhonsawan City

Municipality was exhibited in two important ways: flexibility of working procedures and

improvisation.

Flexibility of Working Procedures

The first dimension of managerial adaptability is flexibility of working procedures. This

sub-theme describes the ability of the Office of Nakhonsawan City Municipality to alter its

administrative procedures to enhance or facilitate crisis response operations. This sub-theme

emerged when participants responded to interview questions about the way orders were given,

the way they communicated with leaders and other members within the organization, the way the

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leaders assigned tasks, and how they reported to their supervisors. Typically, participants

responded to such questions with the assertions that they used flexible working procedures,

informal ways of task assignment, informal procedures of communication, direct

communication, and did not follow hierarchical ways of reporting and supervision. The use of

flexible working procedures found in this case study may be viewed as one dimension of what

Webb (2004) calls “improvisation at the individual level.” According to Webb, improvisation at

the individual level or emergency responders’ role alterations occur when, in response to a crisis,

these responders “short-circuit or bypass established procedures, assume responsibility for things

over which they ordinarily have no authority, violate broader community norms, use makeshift

tools or materials and perform their roles in new places” (as cited in Webb and Chevreau, 2006,

p. 68).

In-depth interview data showed that Nakhonsawan City Municipality was resilient

because, in part, flexibility was encouraged during the time the municipality was responding to a

crisis. Respondents from the Office of Nakhonsawan City Municipality stated that during the

flood crisis informal ways of organizational communication and informal procedures were often

practiced both within their organization and with other participating agencies. According to one

respondent:

Informal communication was often used during the crisis. Communication within our organization and with other agencies was done by using telephones. If we needed help from other agencies, we communicated with them via telephone. Then, a formal, written request was made and sent to that agency later.

Another respondent stated:

In terms of organizational communication, supervisor-level employees, heads of groups, agencies, organizations and neighborhoods could directly communicate with me [the mayor] via phone. For example, the head of civil defense volunteers could call me [the mayor] directly to report the situation. When I [the mayor] wanted them to help me [the mayor], I also contacted them directly. We need the shortest way of communication in

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times of crisis. We need to be as quick as possible when communicating with each other so that we could mobilize our employees to perform tasks as quick as possible. You cannot wait too long when it comes to flooding.

Another respondent added:

Direct communication between workers working at sites and our high-level executives was very normal at that time. I think this also helped facilitate our response because on-scene workers could reach decision makers quickly, which in turn, helped them respond to the situation quickly.

Improvisation

Improvisation is another dimension of managerial adaptability of Nakhonsawan City

Municipality to crisis. Improvisation is identified in previous literature as a quality of high-

reliability organizations that enhances adaptive capacity or resilience (Weick, 1998; Rerup,

2001; Crossan et al. as cited in Bruijne et al., 2010, p. 22). Improvisation can be referred to as the

ability of members of an organization to alter their roles (e.g., changing established procedures,

assuming new responsibility, or using makeshift tools or materials) or the collective ability of an

organization as a whole to expand and extend its scope, to reproduce old structures/processes,

and to create new structures/processes when needed. Thus, improvisation is important because it

is “a key ingredient to effective crisis and emergency management” (Webb and Chevreau, 2006,

p. 67).

Data from personal interviews with both municipal officers and officers from other

agencies participating in the flood response in 2011 are consistent with what has been

documented in previous studies of disaster resilience. Specifically, the success of Nakhonsawan

City Municipality in responding to the flood was due in large part to the fact that its personnel as

well as officers from other responding organizations were able to create new equipment from

whatever materials they had at hand, use new methods to perform tasks, or change/adjust

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existing methods of task performing to fit changed circumstance. One respondent from office of

the municipality noted:

We made big sandbags by ourselves. Big sandbags (also called “big-bags”) were first used in our city and later adopted by many other cities around the nation. We’ve got empty sacks from a sugar factory in our city and then filled sand inside them to make sandbags. We used these “big-bags” to fix our floodwall, build new levee and use them in an effort to recover our water works facilities.

A response from one police officer at Drug and Crime Suppression Unit also showed his

improvised behavior:

I came up with the idea of using farming tractors as vehicles for conducting community crime patrol. With these farming tractors, our police officers were able to go anywhere. Using farming tractors in community crime patrol was very efficient because they could be operated in water of that level, where motor boats and jetski boats could not be operated because the water was quite shallow yet high enough to prevent cars from passing.

Improvisation in the form of operational adaptability was also exhibited when emergency

responders used new ways of managing mass care operations and distributing goods to affected

residents. One officer noted that she worked with high-potential evacuees, changing them from

victims to helpers or partners who participated in mass care provision and shelter operations.

These new ways of management made it easier for her to operate shelter:

I worked with some evacuees. I assigned evacuees who had potential to be leaders and had good communication and coordination skills. These evacuees were assigned to be representatives of evacuees in each sheltering zone. I communicated with these representatives and these representatives passed on such information to other evacuees. Likewise, when evacuees wanted anything, requests were made through their representatives. This method made it easier to provide services in the shelter.

One respondent stated that he worked with leaders of affected neighborhoods, changing them

from victims to helpers or partners who participated in resource distribution and disaster relief

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operation. He noted that working with these neighborhood representatives not only quickened

goods distribution process, he also got more time to work on other tasks:

Everyone needed help at the same time making it harder to take care of all people. What we did was that we worked with neighborhood leaders. We brought food and essential supplies to neighborhood leaders. Food and essential supplies were then distributed by these neighborhood leaders. This way of distributing goods saved a lot of time. If we had to go to every house, it would take like a day to give these goods to all residents in only one neighborhood. Thus, working with neighborhood leaders saved my time and I could be able to focus on other tasks.

As can be seen managerial adaptability contributed to resilience of this municipality. It

enhanced response capacity because it quickened the decision-making process, facilitated

resource mobilization, and helped officers save time and effort in managing operations. Overall,

it helped them adapt and respond to the rapidly changing environment associated with flooding

more effectively.

Crisis Leadership

The role of leaders is critical to the success of disaster response. When a crisis happens,

politicians and public managers are expected to do their best to protect the public interest (Boin

et al., 2005). Generally, when a community is hit by a disaster, leaders are responsible for

supervising crisis operations, communicating with stakeholders, discovering what went wrong,

initiating ways of improvement, and (re) establishing a sense of normalcy. As Boin et al. (2005)

argue; leaders are responsible for performing five strategic tasks in crisis: sense making, decision

making, meaning making, terminating, and learning. In addition, leaders are also expected to

ensure that social bonds between communities members and trust in societal institutions as

conditions for resilience exist in the community during the times of crisis (Boin, 2010). Thus, the

disaster response capacity of a community also depends upon public leadership.

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Crisis leadership can be defined in various ways. For example, Boin et al. (2005) define

leadership as “a set of strategic tasks that encompasses all activities associated with the stages of

crisis management” (p. 9). This dissertation defines crisis leadership in a somewhat different

way. Data gathered from personal interviews with several officers in the Office of Nakhonsawan

City Municipality revealed that, from their perspective, crisis leadership meant the qualities or

characteristics of a leader (the mayor) that enhanced disaster response operations. The specific

qualities or characteristics of leaders that contributed to the success of the flood response in this

municipality were: being dedicated, competent, and inspirational.

Dedicated Leader

When asking what made this municipality so capable of responding to such a crisis, many

of the participants in this study indicated that it was because they had a mayor who was very

hard-working, and who devoted his time and effort to flood response tasks. Four respondents

stated:

I think it’s all because of our mayor. He devoted his time and life to protecting the city from flooding. He did not even have time to take a rest. This year we saw him working all day and night. He did not have time to sleep. He devoted his time and energy to protecting the city from flooding. One reason for why we were so efficient in responding to such a massive flood was that we had a very dedicated mayor. Both of them [the mayor and deputy municipal clerk] were very persistent when they worked.

A dedicated leader in the perspectives of these officers and workers did not only give orders,

supervise staff and direct operations, he also actually did what was normally assigned to first

responders and daily workers, such as moving and laying sandbags to fix the levee and making

visits to all affected neighborhoods. Five respondents noted:

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Our mayor worked with us on the sites most of the time. He helped us lay sandbags. He worked closely together with us on the sites since before the massive flooding occurred until the floodwater receded and city was dried. We have 63 communities [neighborhoods] in this municipality but he was able to visit all these communities to make sure all affected people were helped during the crisis. Not only directing and giving orders, he [the mayor] also joined us in actually doing it. For example, he went down the river to check how deep the flood was or how severe the levee break was. Then he joined us in laying the sandbags. In this preparation phase the mayor worked very hard. We spent about 2 months on preventing water in the river from entering our city. During these two months, the mayor worked on site with our workers all the time. He [the mayor] directed the efforts by himself. He even did some works by himself not just giving orders.

In addition, a dedicated leader in this case also means the one who was always be there on the

scenes with workers to provide operational guides and to help them solve facing problems. Two

participants said:

I saw him [the mayor] working all the time like he did not take a rest at all. He went everywhere whenever he was reported of any urgent matters from first responders. He was there with us at the sites to see if we had any problems and to direct workers how to fix those problems. He did not just give orders to his subordinates and leave all burdens with them. He was there with us all the time and in every critical situation. He was there with us at the sites until flooding had gone.

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Figure 9. Public administrators, emergency workers and volunteers worked together in flood response effort (Office of Nakhonsawan City Municipality, 2011).

Competent Leader

Many respondents answered the question of what made the municipality so capable of

responding to flooding last year with an assertion that they were lucky to have a mayor who was

so knowledgeable, experienced, and skillful at flood prevention and response. Because he was

knowledgeable and had long experiences dealing with repeated flooding, he knew what to do and

what worked best for the municipality. Consistent responses from eight participants reflect this

characteristic of the mayor during the crisis:

Fortunately, we had a good mayor who knew how to deal with floods. Our mayor is very experienced in terms of dealing with floods. When he had got elected as the mayor, he used those knowledge, skills, experience he had learned from the past to fight flooding. It’s like he was ready to work all the time and he knew what to do with this problem. To me he was very knowledgeable in flood response. He knew how to build the wood

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frames, how to lay sandbags and how many sandbags we needed for fixing the broken levee. He had shown great leadership during the flood crisis. He was very experienced in flood response because he has learned from his father, the former mayor. He helped his father when his father was the mayor and he was one of the municipal administrative council members at that time. He learned how to protect a city from flooding and how to respond to it since then. Another good thing about our municipality is that we have the mayor who is so experienced and knowledgeable about flood response. He was very knowledgeable about how to protect a city from flooding and, if it has occurred, he knew how to respond to it. He knew what to do and where to go. He told us to do this and that. He told us to do this and that and I just followed him because I knew that he was very knowledgeable. We had a great mayor who was so knowledgeable about flood response.

In addition to being knowledgeable and having experience, the mayor also exhibited a strong

ability to learn, which allowed him to develop skills that helped him perform more effectively

during the crisis. He noted:

We [the mayor and his team in the office of the municipality] know how to respond to flooding quite well because we dealt with it quite often. We learned from the past that big flooding occurred in every 4 or 5 years. So we anticipated that the chance for severe flooding in last year was high. My experience [the mayor’s] taught me how to deal with flooding. Each year, I have learned so much from flood prevention and response. Because of this accumulated experience, I [the mayor] did much better in last year flooding than any other past years.

Sometimes being competent means being quick in making decisions and taking actions. Two

respondents reflect this quality of the mayor:

He [the mayor] was also quick in terms of thinking and taking action. He [the mayor] was very quick. When he wanted something to be done, he just talked to me and told me to do this and that.

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Competence of the mayor was also reflected in his ability to follow up on assigned tasks, to

communicate with subordinates working on scene, to manage human resource in the crisis and to

be dependable. During the interview, the mayor stated:

Dealing with flood requires you to go through every detail. Thus, you need to keep an eye on the situation and pay close attention to each step or process.

Responses from three other participants also reflected these elements of a competent leader:

He [the mayor] had a simple and easy way of directing the operations and explaining things. The way he communicated with us and the workers was clear and easy to understand. We knew what he wanted and he knew what we could or could not do. Our mayor was good at managing people and assigning tasks to the right persons. Our mayor was great. Sometimes we got a problem of levee break. We called him and within only 5 minutes he showed up at the site. He was on 24-hour standby. We can count on him.

Finally, interview data also revealed one interesting finding. Competence (flood response

knowledge and skills) of the mayor was in part associated with being native to this municipality.

The mayor stated:

I [the mayor] was born and live here so I know the area, I know the geographical characteristics of this municipality. Dealing with floods is a part of my life. I have worked on protecting the city and responding to floods for more than 10 years or since 1995.

Another officer added:

Sometimes the provincial governor had to listen to his recommendation and followed his direction because he [the mayor] was native to this city. He knows the geographical nature of this municipality very well and, thus, he knows what would be the best solutions to the problems particular to this municipality.

Inspirational Leader

Responding to a crisis of this magnitude is a tough task and the operation is often drawn-

out. To be successful, concerted efforts and continued actions from all personnel (officers and

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workers) within the organization are required and it is the job of a leader to ensure this happens.

However, an extended response operation may discourage emergency workers and cause

physical or emotional exhaustion due to work-related stress. Thus, it is also the responsibility of

a leader to create a work environment that encourages workers to continue working diligently to

complete the organizational goals in protecting the city from flooding and addressing emergent

needs. In this case study, the mayor showed his utmost ability in inspiring subordinates, making

them feel comfortable, happy and willing to do their best to fight flooding. Four respondents

stated that they were encouraged by the mayor to continue to work and do it to the best of their

abilities:

He [the mayor] worked hand in hand with us to protect our city. Seeing him working diligently, all the executive, employees, and workers did not give up but continued working. I think it was him that made us strong and, thus, were able to successfully fight the flood. It was just a magic support when we saw him continue to work all day and night. He made us wanted to do the best in our assigned jobs. He never gave up and he told us to not give up too. It was very impressive to see how quick he was and how hard he worked. His work habit encouraged us to keep working on protecting our city and to work harder. He had never left us behind. He was there for us whenever we got problems and needed help. When I saw him working diligently, it made me felt like I had to keep doing my jobs too. When our flood protection systems [floodwall, levee] failed and the entire city was severely flooded, we were so discouraged but he still kept working. When I saw him continued to work, it encouraged me and made me wanted to keep doing my job too.

Another officer from the Municipal Department of Public Works said that he was very

comfortable to work with the mayor and deputy municipal clerk:

We feel very comfortable and happy to work with them. Their kind and easy-going manners made me felt comfortable to work with in time of crisis. They made us happy and wanted to dedicate ourselves to all hard works during the flood. Because of them, we wanted to do our best and did not give up and kept fighting the flood.

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The ways the mayor inspired his subordinates were simple. He did it by doing the jobs and

leading by example. In an interview, the mayor said:

Sometimes the reason for me [the mayor] to show up on the scene was not just to direct or supervise them but to lead them and give them courage so that they could continue working in such an unsafe condition of flooding. I [the mayor] went there right away when I got noticed. I told them not to be scared and continue to work. I stepped up and stood on the broken levee and told them to throw sandbags into the river to fix the levee.

Quality Workforce

Community resilience can be also affected by the characteristics of the workforce

because, in a disaster, these emergency personnel (officers and workers) are responsible for

making choices and taking actions to respond to demands generated by such an extreme event

(Paton and Johnston, 2006). Thus, capability and performance of emergency personnel directly

affect the performance of an organization in dealing with a crisis. In the case of Nakhonsawan

City Municipality, analyses of interview data revealed that the success of its response to the 2011

flooding was, in part, attributable to its quality workforce. Quality workforce here refers to

emergency management officers, professionals, and workers who possess qualities,

characteristics or skills that are helpful for successfully performing difficult response tasks.

Disaster response is often big, complex and prolonged (Boin et al., 2005), thus, requiring

employees who have multiple qualities and skills necessary for doing all those hard works. The

sections that follow discuss qualities or characteristics of personnel that are conductive to an

effective disaster response.

Knowledgeable and Experienced Personnel

Qualities or characteristics that make Nakhonsawan City Municipality’s emergency

workers capable of dealing with flooding are many. In this case study of flood response, quality

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emergency workforce can mean workers who are knowledgeable and have past experiences of

dealing with repeated flooding. Four municipal officers said that it was because these

knowledgeable and experienced workers that made their response successfully:

These workers were very experienced and skillful. They knew how to deal with floodwater because they have been assigned to work in city protection effort every time we faced a situation like this. They knew the best way to lay sandbags and to make the woodworks to reinforce floodwall and fix the broken levee. They did these jobs very well because they had experience of dealing with flooding. They worked in shifts [day or night]. These workers were very knowledgeable about flood prevention because we have been working on site to protect the city from flooding every time we faced major floods. Most of them have been working here for more than 10 years. There are only two guys that are new comers and have been working here just a few years.

Daily workers in Nakhonsawan City Municipality who fully participated in the flood response

last year said that they were assigned for flood prevention and response every time the city faced

flooding and, hence, they had gained much experience in dealing with floods. According to eight

respondents:

We did not have big problem because we had so much experience in dealing with repeated flooding. Compared to other cities, we did not have many problems. We have been working here since the administration of the former mayor, who was the father of our present mayor. This was because we have dealt with flooding since 1995 and, thus, we have built our strong foundation, knowledge and experience of flood prevention and how to properly respond to it once it has occurred. We were experienced in dealing with such a crisis. We responded to flooding every year because flooding occurred very often in this municipality. I have done these jobs for more than 20 years.

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I think it is because we are familiar with flooding. I have done all these jobs since I have worked in the Department of Public Works. So, I am familiar with my jobs. I have been involved in flood response since the first major flooding back in 1995. I am very familiar with techniques or methods used to protect our city from flooding and what to do in case the city was flooded. I am very experienced in blocking drainage pipes, diving into the pipes or the base of the river to lay sandbags to cover the leaks.

One municipal officer noted that the operation went well because the municipality’s emergency

manager was experienced and knowledgeable of flood response:

Our manager at the Municipal Office of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation was also very good at emergency management. He was highly experienced in flood response. He knew the areas and he knew what to do. He was very good at coordination. He knew the problems and knew how to solve each problem. He has a hands-on experience.

Another respondent added:

It was the experience of our workers, officers, and local executives in dealing with repeated flooding.

Figure 10. The Orange Angels or municipal employees worked day and night shifts to prevent the floodwater from entering the city (Office of Nakhonsawan City Municipality, 2011).

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Hard-working, dedicated Personnel

As mentioned earlier, disaster response operation is quite complex and drawn-out, which

requires workers to provide sustained and continued effort. Working to support such a prolonged

operation often causes physical and/or psychological stresses, which may compromise the

overall performance of the organization. In this case study, Nakhonsawan City Municipality

might have experienced less success, or even failure, if its employees were not so dedicated and

hard working. Six respondents said that the municipality was very successful in the flood

response last year because its employees worked very hard and were dedicated to their tasks.

According to these respondents:

Our personnel were also very responsible in their job and very dedicated. This made our waste disposal in crisis time very successful. They were called “Orange Angels” by the residents to represent their hard work in city protection effort. We called them “Orange Angels.” This name was given because they worked so hard for the entire city and they always wore orange uniforms when doing their jobs. Our citizens were thankful to these employees for their hard work and dedication. These workers worked very hard to fight flooding and to help our people. Some of them are street workers from municipality’s Department of Public Health and some were from Department of Public Work. Another reason why we responded to flooding last year quite well was that…chief officers and workers in the city municipality office were so dedicated and worked very hard to help the people and to fight the flood. I felt sorry for them because they worked very hard but also proud that they did very well. Our officers and workers were…dedicated to their works.

Another employee stated:

When the city was flooded, I worked until 1 a.m., 2 a.m., 3 a.m., and sometimes 4 a.m. We worked, ate, and slept on the trucks until flooding had gone. I and my subordinates had to be on 24-hour standby in the truck so that we could go to the scenes as quickly as possible if something went wrong.

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Supportive and Responsible Personnel

The last two characteristics of a quality workforce that emerged in data collected from

personal interviews with municipal personnel (officers and workers) were being supportive and

responsible. According to two respondents, these two characteristics also contributed to the

overall performance of the office of the city municipality in the flood response last year. They

noted:

All other department heads, employees and workers have done their jobs diligently and were very supportive. Each of us was responsible for what had been assigned. We did our best to get our jobs done.

Knowledge Sharing and Learning

Knowledge of hazards and community characteristics is identified as an element of

disaster resilience at the community level (Buckle, 2006). It is argued in this dissertation that not

only knowledge of hazards and community characteristics is important to developing and

maintaining a community’s adaptive capacity, but the ability of participating organizations to

share such information and learn from each other also enhances resilience.

Data gathered from interviews with officers from the Office of Nakhonsawan City

Municipality and the Office of Nakhonsawan Province suggest that through sharing information

about operations and experience of performing tasks in meetings, response operations such as

sheltering and mass care can be enhanced when officers and workers learn from experiences

and best practices of others. By sharing operation-related knowledge and learning from best

practices, desirable results of operations can be generated in all work sites (e.g., all shelters).

Three officers noted that sharing experiences, information, and knowledge about operations with

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other key persons in the provincial morning meeting was one of their important duties during the

course of flood response:

At the meeting, I reported situations in the shelter to the provincial governor and shared my experience, problems and solutions to those problems with other shelter directors. We shared information with agency heads participating in the meeting and, then, planned to respond to the situation day by day. Some chiefs of agencies have not had experience in disaster relief, social work or shelter operation before. Thus, we gathered in the provincial office every morning and discussed how each of us did a job.

Figure 11. Representatives of organizations involved in the 2011 flood response in Nakhonsawan Province attended the daily morning meeting at the provincial office (Office of Nakhonsawan City Municipality, 2011).

Other participants also stated that they learned from the experiences of others and adopted best

practices to improve operations that they were responsible for:

We tried to learn from each other, learn from the best practice. Each of us shared his/her experience in operating responsible shelter.

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Best practices were adopted by others so that the same results or achievement could be generated in all shelters. When these organizations were assigned to do the job such as shelter operation, they tried to learn how to do the job they have never done before and they did a good job.

Organizational Preparedness

Preparedness has often been identified in previous studies as one factor that creates

disaster resilience at individual and household levels (e.g., Cottrell, 2006; Jang and Wang, 2009;

Paton et al., 2006). These studies, however, generally do not discuss preparedness as an element

that promotes resilience at organizational and/or community (societal) levels. In this dissertation,

it is argued that preparedness of all organizations participating in disaster response also

contributes significantly to the capability of a community as a whole (the city municipality) to

cope with flooding.

Data from in-depth interviews with officers from various governmental and non-

governmental agencies involved in the flood response revealed that one reason why

Nakhonsawan City Municipality did very well in dealing with flooding was that the office of the

city municipality and other response organizations had planned operations well, prepared

necessary resources, trained volunteers, and educated residents about flood responses. According

to some officers, because the office of the city municipality and other related agencies had

planned well before and during the crisis, their response operations went well. These respondents

stated:

The daily morning meeting was held in the provincial office. At the meeting, we discussed and planned to evacuate the residents, how to respond to flooding in the city municipality which was the heartland of the province, how to warn people, and how to accommodate evacuees. I think they [office of the city municipality] were capable of dealing with flooding and they did a good job. They planned ahead. They knew if the water came, where would be the first area at risk and what should we do first.

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I think they [office of the city municipality] did a pretty good job and one reason was that the team of municipal executives had planned well to respond to flooding. In the meeting we talked about what we had done in the previous day, what problems we faced and what would be the next steps. Then, tasks were assigned to each agency/department. During the flood crisis, we had a morning meeting every day at the provincial office. The meeting was chaired by the provincial governor and started at 7 a.m. We discussed what has happened (the problems), what has been done to respond to the problems, and what we should do next. They [office of the city municipality] planned very well on how to drain water. They used their four main underground pumps to drain water. To quicken the process, they also asked farmers to provide portable pumps and gave some money to them in return.

Some respondents said that response operations went well because volunteers were trained well

to assist officers in operations and residents were educated about how to take protective actions

during a crisis. Trained volunteers enhanced operations because they knew what to do and how

to work with officers in the most efficient way. Educated residents also helped officers by

reducing burdens during the response because they knew how to act appropriately to save their

lives and property. One municipal officer noted:

Three days before flooding, we conducted an emergency exercise to make people prepared so that they knew how to act during the crisis. The provincial office helped us with this training. We created a scenario for people and guided them where and how to seek the nearest shelters.

One member of the Civil Defense Volunteer (CDV) responded:

We were trained by our organization, the Civil Defense Volunteer (CDV), to perform those tasks in emergencies. We were trained twice a year. We were trained to help people in emergencies, to fight fire, to use guns, and search and rescue. Sometimes we conducted a drill to review the knowledge that we were trained and to prepare for actual situations that might happen. This kind of drill was conducted in every three months.

Two provincial officers stated:

These volunteers were residents who have been trained to assist officers in emergencies. Our volunteers were trained to handle traffics, fight fires, perform search and rescue, and

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conduct community patrols. Trainings are organized and supported by the Nakhonsawan Province’s Office of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation in cooperation with Police Department and the Regional III Military Base. They are trained in firefighting [both theory and practice], how to use equipment in rescue, and techniques of search and rescue. In city municipality, municipal CDV members are trained once a year. However, they can conduct more drills or exercises based on their needs such as water search and rescue. In such cases, the municipality may cooperate with other agencies.

Other officers talked about volunteers who were specially trained to perform specific tasks such

as warning (Mr.Warning) and search and rescue (One Tambon One Search & Rescue Team or

one sub-district one search & rescue team-OTOS):

Each year we organized a two-day training course for these people. We trained 50 people each year and appointed them Mr. Warnings. The purpose of OTOS is to create a search & rescue team in each sub-district. The role of OTOS is lifesaving so they search and provide basic medical services to disaster victims in their sub-districts. We teach them to search for victims and provide triage to those people. They also need to know how to provide first aid and how to safely transport victims to the nearest hospitals.

Organizational preparedness that enhanced response capacity of Nakhonsawan City Municipality

also included preparing resources necessary for flood response operations. The Office of

Nakhonsawan City Municipality prepared resources for flood responses by reserving money for

emergency uses, allocating and pre-assigning personnel, making sure materials such as crushed

rock, sand and sacks were available and ready to be mobilized for city protection and floodwater

draining efforts and, finally, checking if all flood protection systems, facilities and equipment

were functional. Some officers described resource preparing activities that occurred in the Office

of Nakhonsawan City Municipality:

Each year when flooding was likely to occur, our mayor ordered us to prepare materials and equipment necessary for use in responses such as pumps, sandbags, crushed rock, sand, and others.

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Because of this importance of our drainage system, in June each year we check our facilities to see if there is anything wrong and needs to be fixed to make sure our drainage systems are functional and ready for use in case of flooding. We maintain our drainage systems on a regular basis. Equipment and materials necessary for protecting city from flooding such as crushed stone, sand, and sacks for making sandbags were prepared. We were responsible for procuring these materials and providing logistical support. Another important thing needed to be prepared was workforce, especially our street-level workers. We were able to promptly respond to flooding because all resources were already prepared. We prepared by setting budget for use in case of flooding. Flooding in low-lying area such as in Koh-Yuan village (one neighborhood) was anticipated to occur every year. So we reserved some money for managing such a situation.

Organizational Integration

In-depth interview data from this field research project also revealed one interesting

phenomenon that may help constitute resilience of local government in the wake of the flood

crisis. This phenomenon is labeled here as organizational integration. This concept has not been

extensively discussed in previous studies of disaster resilience. In the field of organizational

management, organizational integration is defined as the extent to which distinct and

interdependent organizational components constitute a unified whole and is hypothesized as

having impacts on organizational performance (Barki and Pinsonneault, 2005).

Organizational integration in this dissertation, however, describes or looks at the positive

working relationship among various departments within the Office of Nakhonsawan City

Municipality, as the leading organization that responded to the 2011 flooding. Positive working

relations that enhanced crisis management operations were revealed in the way officers and

workers acted and treated each other when working together in the operations. Thus, the unity of

all personnel in the organization, the acts of cooperating, supporting, and being willing to help

each other, and the orientation of all personnel toward completing the same organizational goals

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were elements of organizational integration that enhanced the effectiveness of collective actions.

During the crisis, the Office of Nakhonsawan City Municipality was able to mobilize a coherent

effort to deal with flooding because all its departments and personnel were cooperative, helped

each other, supported the tasks of others if needed, and focused on the same organizational goals,

not the goal of each individual department. Evidence from the interviews with municipal officers

well supports this claim. Three respondents said that the personnel in the office of the city

municipality were very cooperative that they supported and helped each other to complete their

tasks in flood responses:

All levels of executives within the municipal office were supportive and helped each other. In time of crisis like this, everyone needed to do something even though you were not given an order. You needed to help others. It was a common sense that we needed to support others. They [officers at the office of the city municipality] were very cooperative during our response efforts.

Another municipal officer said that all personnel had focused on achieving the same

organizational goals:

We focused on our whole organizational goal not personal or departmental goal. We wanted to help each other to achieve the same goal, to protect our city. We looked at a mutual success not individual departmental success.

One participant noted that municipal executives, officers, and workers respected and got along

with each other well when working together in the operations.

The mayor and our employees respected and got along very well with each other when they worked together on scene. The mayor knew the ability of the employees and he knew how to instruct them or give orders. The employees knew what the mayor expected. So they worked very well together. This helped quicken our response and recovery operations.

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Another two respondents said that they worked together to complete tasks and provided a good

cooperation to each other:

We cooperated with the municipality’s Office of Public Relations to plan our risk communication strategies. We worked together to select data and information to be posted on the website. I think good cooperation of all the people in the city municipality office and the active role of our mayor helped us respond to this crisis successfully.

Sectoral Integration

Crisis management often involves a big, complex, and drawn-out operation (Boin et al.,

2005). This big and prolonged operation requires all constituent parts of the community (or a

whole society) to organize a coherent, concerted effort and mobilize resources from all sectors.

In order to organize a coherent, concerted effort and mobilize resources from various

organizations to deal with the crisis, all constituent parts of the society need to be cooperative,

willing to support/help each other, and able to work together well enough. Such positive social

conditions would create a working environment that enhances cooperation, coordination and

communication among multiple organizations from all sectors, which in turn, allowed them to

organize a coherent, concerted effort and mobilize resources necessary for flood response more

easily.

As briefly explained above, sectoral integration is defined in this research as a state of

being a unified whole or the unity of all constituent parts of the society. It is a concept used here

to describe how well all sectors (public, private-for-profit, nonprofit, and citizens) in

Nakhonsawan City Municipality (as a society) worked together in organizing a coherent,

concerted effort and mobilizing necessary resources to achieve the same goal of successful flood

response.

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The community that has high sectoral integration in this dissertation may be somewhat

similar to a competent community in previous studies of disaster resilience. For example, Pooley

et al. (2006) argue that community competence can be a source of resilience to disaster impacts.

Competent community can be resilient in times of crisis because it is able to utilize, develop

and/or obtain resources (including human resources) in the community (Sonn and Fisher as cited

in Pooley et al., 2006). Cottrell (1976) adds that a competent community can be resilient in time

of crisis because it is able to collaborate effectively in identifying needs and issues, achieve a

working consensus, agree on ways to implement agree-upon goals, and can carry out tasks

collaboratively and effectively. The concept of sectoral integration in this research may also be

similar to the concept of collective efficacy. In their study of community resilience to tsunami

impacts in the southern provinces of Thailand, Paton and Tang (2006) found that collective

efficacy, an adaptive capacity of the community as a whole, is one factor of disaster resilience.

They define collective efficacy as “the shared belief that a group can effectively meet

environmental demands and improve their lives through concerted effort” (Bandura as cited in

Paton and Tang, 2008, p. 236).

Data from in-depth interview with participants from various organizations demonstrated

that sectoral integration in Nakhonsawan City Municipality existed during the flood crisis.

Sectoral integration in this case study was exhibited in several positive social actions, behaviors,

or conditions. They included: unity of all constituent parts of the society; willingness of the

people (residents) to participate and help; good cooperation of multiple organizations from

various sectors; multiple actors from various sectors worked well together to perform tasks or

provide goods and services; and organizations from various sectors worked in partnership or

formed a collaborative effort. Sectoral integration served as a condition that enhanced resilience

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of this city municipality. Some participants stated that all sectors worked together well and

provided good cooperation. According to these respondents:

I think our office of the municipality, provincial agencies, private sector and the citizens worked together quite well. They provided good cooperation. We and the mayor and other managers worked closely together all the time. This is a catastrophic event so we and other provincial agencies worked closely together with local government [the city municipality]. I think all sectors provided good cooperation. The municipality received good support and cooperation from agencies and organizations from all sector. We got good cooperation. The agencies that were assigned to operate shelters did their best to help evacuees. Each department or agency brought in its staff to manage shelter operations. We also had public health units from two major hospitals taking care of evacuees in shelters. The reason for doing such a great job was that every agency, everyone was so cooperative. We did not have any coordination problems with other agencies participating in the flood response. We coordinated well with the provincial office, district and sub-district organizations, Public Health Department, and all others. We worked with all these agencies and had no problem.

Other respondents noted that multiple organizations from various sectors cooperated or formed

collaborative efforts to perform tasks or provide services together:

This was a cooperative effort with the provincial office. We co-operated these shelters because it would be difficult if we did this alone. We did not have enough resources (especially personnel) to manage 12 shelters during the crisis, thus we needed help from the province. We cooperated with Nakhonsawan Province’s Social Development and Human Security officers and Disaster Prevention and Mitigation officers to manage this shelter. We worked with police officers to patrol our levees to see if there were any leaks and to make sure there was no one trying to destroy them. We worked closely together with neighborhood leaders to distribute food and essential supplies to affected people.

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We worked with our partners such as Provincial Public Health Department and provincial hospitals to provide health care services to affected people. [Each time] we had marine police officers or municipality boat operators, and members of Civil Defense Volunteer (CDV) joined us in our community patrol. We worked together as a team. We provided a 24-hour community crime patrol.

Some participants stated that each organization/group actively participated in the operation. Each

took part and tried to contribute to response operations as much as they could:

We provided meals for evacuees. All the basic needs were well served. Clothes were donated by the people. Water was continuously provided by the municipality. Medical services were provided by Department of Public Health and local hospitals. Police officers came to take care of security issues. Officials from the Office of Social Development and Human Security were responsible for registering and accommodating evacuees. Police and military officers took care of security issue and made sure that peace and order within the shelter existed because there were many evacuees from different places. Staff from Civil Defense Volunteer (CDV) helped with patrols both at day and night. Police officers and soldiers ensured order, peace and security. I was responsible for allocating space within this temple and managing the warehouse where food and essential supplies were stored. Officials from the Provincial Office of Social Development and Human Security looked at the overall operation and management issues. Some organizations who have never been engaged in flood response before also actively participated in last year response. These included businesses, schools, and the Office of Lands. Everyone worked hard to help the municipality. When a disaster such as this one happened, I can say that all provincial agencies, departments, and other organizations from private sector were actively involved in the response. Doctors, nurses, public health personnel from major hospitals were on standby to help patients in shelters. Police officers came to ensure safety and security within shelters.

Other respondents noted that it was the unity of all people and groups of residents in the society

that made the municipality strong. Their willingness to participate in the operations, help

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emergency workers, and their good cooperation enhanced the capacity of the city municipality to

respond to the crisis. According to these officers:

Another important thing that we got during this crisis was the unity of all the people in this municipality. Whenever people saw us working on laying sandbags to prevent flood water from entering the city, they volunteered to help us. Other organizations did the same thing. Sometimes it was not their duty, whenever they saw us fighting with the floods they jumped in to offer helps. I think it was the unity of all the people in the city municipality that helped us through the crisis. Another thing could be support from all the people. I can still recall how much we received support from the people. Whenever our flood protection system failed and the water leaked in, without asking for help, the residents, business employees, and nurses from nearby areas jumped in to help us protecting the city. It was an impressive picture that I will never forget. Our people seemed not to be reluctant to help whenever they see us working on protecting our city. Another important support was from our residents. We saw the generosity and unity of our people. They helped each other and helped us respond to the floods. Another impressive picture I saw was that not only members of Civil Defense Volunteer (CDV) but also monks, residents from many different neighborhoods, bank employees, nurses, doctors, hospital employees, and business employees came at our work site to help us made sandbags for use in case of levee breaks. We saw these people working diligently every morning. And whenever the levee failed and we needed labor power for laying sandbags to fix the levee, these people did not hesitate to help us. It was very impressive. Cooperation from the people in our city was quite good. This is very important. Cooperation and support from the people are needed in flood prevention effort, which is labor intensive. We needed help from the people. We needed their labor support in filling sandbags and laying those sandbags to reinforce the levee. In our case, sometimes we used more than 500 people each day to help in city protection and floodwater drainage efforts. We might not be able to fix the levee in time if we did not get help from the residents. In some cases, about 1,000 residents came to the site to help us fill sandbags and lay them around and over the levee and helped in other jobs as needed. Not only residents that were very helpful, businesses were also supportive by providing meals, drinking water, clothes, and other commodities to our staff. They helped us as much as they could. People helped each other. They gave whatever they had. Some gave money and commodities. Some volunteered their labor. I think it is the Thai culture.

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We were so lucky last year because we received a lot of support from volunteers, clubs, foundations, and the people. These people were so quick. Whenever we needed help, they showed up very quickly at the sites or our office.

Summary of Chapter

This chapter has identified and described the various factors that contributed to the

resilience of local government in responding to the 2011 flood disaster. Conceptual themes that

emerged in the interview data suggest that factors enhancing the ability of Nakhonsawan City

Municipality to respond to the flooding are numerous. First, the municipality primarily used its

own resources in responding to the floods, but it was also able to strategically draw in resources

from other governmental and non-governmental organizations, both within and outside its

administrative boundary. Managerial adaptability also enhanced disaster response ability of this

municipality. As a leading response organization in this crisis, the city was able to handle the

situations and address problems successfully because it used flexible working procedures in

organizational communication, task assignment, employee supervision and reporting. Its

managerial adaptability was also exhibited in its ability to improvise in the response by using

whatever it had at hand to perform tasks and adapting its operations to fit with changed

circumstances.

Leadership was another important element of resilience in this organization. The majority

of respondents pointed out that the reason why the municipality was so capable of responding to

the flood crisis last year was that they had a great leader (the mayor). The success of the Office

of Nakhonsawan City Municipality in responding to the flood was also attributable to it quality

workforce. Moreover, interview data showed that organizational preparedness, knowledge

sharing and learning affected the response capability of this municipality. Finally, resilience of

the Office of Nakhonsawan Municipality was also evidenced through organizational and sectoral

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integration. While this chapter focused on the resilience of local government, the next chapter

identifies sources of resilience at the neighborhood level.

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CHAPTER 6

RESULTS 2: RESILIENCE OF NEIGHBORHOODS


In addition to gaining a better understanding of the sources of resilience for local

government, this study also sought to identify similar sources for neighborhoods. Toward that

end, a focus group interview was conducted with residents of the stricken community. Several

of the municipal officers that were interviewed noted that there were three neighborhoods in

particular that were cut off from the mainland municipality, making it difficult for the office of

the municipality, as the lead response organization, to access these neighborhoods and provide

assistance. These neighborhoods, however, exhibited resilience by forming a cooperative effort

to deal with flooding and address emergent needs themselves, calling themselves “strong

neighborhoods.”

To better understand the sources of resilience for these neighborhoods, the researcher

visited them and recruited neighborhood members to participate in the research project. With the

help of the municipal clerk and the leader of Wat Kao village (a neighborhood), eight

neighborhood members were recruited to participate in a two-hour focus group interview. These

participants (including neighborhood leaders and members) were founders of the cooperative

effort and actively involved in the response from the beginning until the end of the crisis. Thus,

they were information-rich participants. Data analysis revealed eight factors that promoted

resilience of these strong neighborhoods. This chapter presents the conceptual themes that

emerged from the focus group interview.

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Figure 12. Factors for resilience of neighborhoods.

Self-reliance

In the research conducted in Taiwan to find out why Hakka people, indigenous

minorities, were able to cope with the impact of the 921 Earthquake, self-reliance was found to

be one source of resilience at the personal/individual level (Jang and Wang, 2009). Similarly,

focus group data suggest that self-reliance is also important at the neighborhood level—that is, it

is a characteristic not just of individuals but also larger collectivities, including neighborhoods.

Self-reliance in this research describes the attitude of neighborhood members toward their roles

in the disaster response and the behaviors or actions taken to help themselves during the time of

flood crisis. Self-reliance as an attitude shaped the thoughts or perspectives of members of these

neighborhoods, leading them to perceive that they, not the local government, should be directly

responsible for responding to the crisis. From their perspective, the neighborhoods belong to

them and, thus, members of each neighborhood should stand up and help themselves first, rather

than waiting for others to help. According to the respondents:

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We have to rely on ourselves first before asking other people to help. This is our home. We have to take care of our home first. We should try to help ourselves first. If we could not handle it, then we can ask them to help. Although we were affected by the flood, it was not right to think that we were helpless or incapacitated. We should not just lay on the bed provided by the government agency and wait for other people to help. We should try the best to help ourselves first. When flooding spread out to cover most of the municipality area, the problems and needs were increasing and it was very difficult for only one organization [the office of the municipality] to manage the situation and help people in all neighborhoods. Thus, we must help ourselves. We had to rely on ourselves first before they came in.

Other respondents said that everyone was responsible for disaster response, and that is not the

sole responsibility of government agencies. Thus, neighborhood members needed to stand up and

help themselves. According to these respondents:

To me, disaster management belongs to everybody. It does not belong to us only or belong to the government agencies only. It is the job of everyone. It is about you do your job and I do my job. Everyone needs to play his/her role. Government agencies have to do their jobs. Likewise, the people need to do their jobs as well. I think flood response is not the job of government agency only. If you think it is a sole responsibility of the government agency, this is not right. Flooding response is a job of everyone. We all need to stand up to do this job by ourselves. If we do not help ourselves, we might have suffered more from the impacts of flooding.

Two participants noted that neighborhood members should not feel helpless. They should instead

trust in their abilities to help themselves and help the government agencies respond to the crisis:

We all have to rethink. Government agencies should not think that people could not help themselves. Likewise, citizens should not think that we are decapitated and only waiting for public agencies to help. We have to stand up to help ourselves and help government agencies to respond to the crisis. The city does not belong to the municipal office only. It belongs to us all. Thus, we have to work together to solve the problems.

One municipal officer also discussed this self-reliance attitude of the people in these strong

neighborhoods:

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The neighborhood leaders told me that they were not beggars or vulnerable people who only waited for others to help. They were able to help themselves.

A self-reliance attitude translated into collective response actions taken by members of these

three neighborhoods to deal with floodwater and solve problems associated with the flooding.

These self-reliant collective actions included such things as members of these neighborhoods

self-operating shelters and providing mass care for themselves, using their own ways of

distributing goods and managing resources in response operations, performing evacuations by

themselves, and making decisions regarding the flood response by themselves. According to

some respondents:

We managed our own shelter. We only requested for things. We did not request for people because once we got the things that we wanted we managed them by ourselves. We had our own ways to manage the resources that we got. Most of the time evacuation was done by the people in our neighborhood. Government agencies should provide materials and equipment but let us do it in our ways. Government agencies should provide supports but let neighborhood members decide what to do and let them do the jobs as well.

The ability of these neighborhood members to perform response tasks was also reflected in the

data obtained from individual interviews with some municipal officers. According to these

respondents:

They asked for materials and equipment but they managed those materials by themselves. They set up shelter at the hillside where floodwater could not reach. They also had their temporary kitchen and donation center. They cooked for themselves. They did not wait for the office of the municipality to come to help. They took care of about 400 residents.

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Figure 13. Members of the three neighborhoods self-operated shelters and provided mass care for evacuees (Office of Nakhonsawan City Municipality, 2011).

Cooperation

One important factor that made these neighborhoods resilient to the impacts of flooding

in 2011 was cooperation. Cooperation is identified in previous research as a source of resilience.

According to Rhinard and Sundelius (2010), cooperation provides for effective coordination,

improves resource distribution, builds trust and nurtures social capital. These conditions or

circumstances are conductive to resilience. In this case study, during the crisis, the three adjacent

neighborhoods including Wat Kao, Decha, and Dhevada Sang formed a cooperative effort to

fight flooding and to protect their people and mutual interests. Data from the focus group

interview revealed that cooperation among these neighborhoods promoted their resilience in

several ways. First, it helped them to successfully organize a strong, concerted effort to perform

area protection tasks (preventing floodwater from the river to enter their neighborhoods).

According to some participants:

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Before the floodwater reached here, the three neighborhoods, which are located in this area, cooperated in area protection effort. The three neighborhoods formed a cooperative group to strengthen the levee. Before the levee failed, each neighborhood was assigned a zone for protection. Each had to be responsible for flood prevention in its assigned zone. The three neighborhoods cooperated fully in the effort to protect our areas from flooding. If the levees failed, all three neighborhoods would be inundated, not just one. Thus, we’d better cooperate in this effort. If we fully cooperated, we all could win.

We cooperated with Wat Kao neighborhood in an effort to prevent our areas from flooding.

In addition, cooperation helped them to mobilize labor power, resources, and equipment that

were already available within each neighborhood. When these three neighborhoods fully

cooperated in the response effort, they shared resources with each other and thereby forming a

bigger resource pool available for all. Through sharing, they not only had more but also a

variety of resources, which benefited a cooperative, response operation. Some participants stated:

Our cooperation was aimed at sharing resources and giving mutual benefits. It was simple. You shared what you had and we shared what we had. During the flood, we got enough food because we shared whatever we had. I had rice I gave rice. He had fish he gave fish. She had fishery equipment she gave them to us to catch fish in the river. Other people shared preserved food and other ingredients. We also communicated with other nearby neighborhoods to see if they needed anything. We sent our sandbags, boats and people to neighborhoods that were in need of supplies.

Some participants admitted that, through cooperation, resources and expertise from all

neighborhoods were pulled together making a larger pool of resources that all could use. This

enhanced response operations. They also added that cooperation helped them respond to flooding

better than going it alone. They noted:

They [members of the three neighborhoods] have seen how powerful it was when we worked together as a team. We were able to respond to it more effectively than doing it alone because we shared our resources, labors (workers), and strategies.

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If we did not cooperate with Wat Kao neighborhood, our neighborhood would be flooded anyway. So, I thought that we should work with them. Later, I thought I had made the right decision because this cooperative effort helped us respond to the flood better than working alone.

Finally, cooperation also served as a means to gain resources from external sources. According

to some participants:

Another important thing is that cooperation helped us to be heard and known by other external organizations. When we formed a cooperative effort by combining people and resources from the participating neighborhoods, we looked bigger and could be heard or seen by external organizations more easily. When those organizations have recognized our existence, they would be able to help us by providing food, essential supplies, materials, equipment, labor power and financial assistance. They could also gain resources and supports from other organizations for us. Forming a cooperative effort made it easier to bring our problems and needs to the attention of government agencies. It [cooperative effort] was like a window connecting us to the outside world and, thereby, gaining supports, assistance and resources. Cooperation among our people helped us gain more assistance and resources.

Local Wisdom

Locally accumulated knowledge, or local wisdom, can be another source of resilience at

the neighborhood level. In the paper that reviews the concept of resilience, Manyena (2006)

argues that “local adaptation strategies, culture, heritage, knowledge and experiences are

building blocks for boosting disaster resilience” (p. 445). This dissertation found some empirical

evidence that supports the notion that local wisdom influences response capacity of villages or

neighborhoods. Local wisdom in this research may be defined as the knowledge of human

adaptation to the local environment that has been accumulated over a long period of time. Data

from the focus group interview found that local wisdom played an important part in the flood

responses of these strong neighborhoods. It provided them knowledge about the flood hazard and

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guided them to take protective actions and employ response strategies that already proved to be

effective in past, similar crisis situations.

Data from this case study revealed that knowledge of the flood hazard, proper protective

actions and effective response strategies were obtained from several forms of local wisdom.

Firstly, knowledge of the flood hazard and response strategies was gained from experience of

dealing or facing with repeated flooding. According to some participants:

Our long experience of dealing with flooding helps us continue our ways of life. Our methods of flood prevention and response this time have been developed or adapted from our past experience. Our citizens used their experience and local knowledge to determine the level of water that could cause massive flooding. They also knew what to do because they faced flooding almost every year. At least, we have gained a lot of experience from dealing with floods. So whenever it comes, we know how to deal with it. Like I said it happened spontaneously. Each year we learned from our past experience on how to prevent water in the river from entering our neighborhoods. It happens every year so people are familiar with it. Whenever it happens, our experience guides us what to do to respond to it. During the time of flooding, we tried to learn how to respond to it and continue to build the knowledge of flood response from each time. Then, we applied our knowledge gained from experience to fight the next flooding. I think because we get used to it. We are familiar with flooding as it happened quite often here. We dealt with it almost every year. Each time we faced flooding we tried to learn from it so that we could do better next times. I think our capacity was a result of our accumulated knowledge gained from facing recurrent flooding. Flooding in our neighborhood is normal because we live in low-lying area. Our neighborhood is located by the Chao Praya River. Thus, flooding is a part of our lives. We faced it every year. Sometimes we faced minor flooding but sometimes like this year we faced a very severe flooding.

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Local cultures also contributed to effective response. For example, a culture of helping each

other made it easy for them to mobilize labor power and resources necessary for response

operations. Some respondents noted:

Another thing was that helping each other was our local culture. Thus, once we saw the problem, we were willing to help. Our willingness to help each other just happened naturally.

Preparedness

When communities are isolated from external assistance and their access to normal

societal resources and functions is limited due to the impacts of disasters, preparedness plays an

important role in helping people cope with such impacts and adapt to changed circumstances

(Jang and Wang, 2009; Paton et al., 2006; Birkland, 2010). In the case of these strong

neighborhoods, the concept of preparedness is used to describe the processes of preparation that

took place before the neighborhoods were inundated by the floodwater. Thus, preparedness could

be viewed as a result of anticipation. As noted earlier, people in these three neighborhoods faced

flooding almost every year, so flooding has become a normal phenomenon and is anticipated to

occur in this area every year. When the occurrence of such an extreme event was anticipated,

villagers living in these flood-prone neighborhoods were well prepared to respond to it.

Preparedness activities in these neighborhoods took many forms. It could be an act of

gathering information of needs, vulnerabilities and creating capacity or resident volunteer

inventories. One municipal officer talked about preparedness in these strong neighborhoods:

Before flooding occurred, they did a community survey to assess needs. They recorded the number of the elderly, children, people with disability, and other vulnerable population. They also identified number of those who can volunteer to work in response operations during the crisis. All these data were gathered to make the database for management.

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One focus group participant who was actively engaged in flood response in these strong

neighborhoods also mentioned this information gathering process that took place before

flooding:

Before massive flooding occurred, we gathered information about the number of possible evacuees and how many tents we needed. Once we got all this information, we submitted the request with this information attached to the office of the municipality and other organizations asking them to provide tents for us. We did the same thing for water. We collected all the information and made a request to the office of the municipality.

Preparedness within these neighborhoods also included such activities as storing dry food and

emergency supplies, preparing and checking equipment and materials necessary for response.

Focus group participants noted:

Before the flood season, each family stored dry food, rice, and essential supplies in case of flooding. We did this every year. We must be prepared to help ourselves because sometimes it took so long for the government agencies to reach our neighborhoods. Here we all have boats because our neighborhood faced repeated flooding almost every year. In May or June each year our residents check their boats to see if they are still functional or need to be repaired. This is how we prepared for the flood. We prepared for the flood by storing food, essential supplies and making sure our boats are functional in case we need to use them.

Two municipal officers also said something similar to the above statement regarding

preparedness of these strong neighborhoods:

They check if their boats are functional or to see if there is anything needs to be fixed. They make sure if they have enough dry food and essential supplies.

Another aspect of neighborhood preparedness was to reserve money for use in times of crisis.

One of these strong neighborhoods (Wat Khao neighborhood) had reserved half of its

community saving fund for use in response and recovery. Because of this community saving

fund, they were able to acquire enough resources for response and were able to repair their

residences and return to their normal life quickly. Some respondents said:

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Another part of the fund is saved for use in case something bad happens in our neighborhood in the future such as disasters. We saved this part of our community saving fund for use to respond to such crises. We used this money to respond to flooding last year.

Training and education also made members of these neighborhoods well prepared. Some

respondents (especially neighborhood leaders) stated that they participated in disaster

management courses offered by government agencies and then information or knowledge about

flood impacts, appropriate protective actions and response strategies were relayed to other

members of the neighborhoods. According to a leader of one neighborhood:

The office of the municipality has offered community-based disaster management training course every month. It was just held last week for this month and I, as a neighborhood leader, attended the training. Now I am serving as a village leader, a village health volunteer (VHV) and also a village police. So I had to participate in that training. We have 4 VHVs in our village. They also attended the training. In addition to the training provided by the office of the municipality, we also attended disaster response and first air course offered by Public Health Department in cooperation with the office of the municipality. We were trained how to provide first aid to people during the flood and also to promote good health in our neighborhood. Also included in those training courses are how to deal with electrical appliances and equipment, how to prepare communication devices, and how to help the elderly in the event of flooding. As a neighborhood leader, I have to pass on the knowledge that I have learned from attending those trainings to my fellow residents. We need to know what to do before and during the flooding and also how to recover from it.

Another preparedness activity that may contribute to the success of the flood response in these

strong neighborhoods was their prior disaster planning for response. This planning session took

place two or three months before the anticipated flooding. During these two or three months,

members of the neighborhood gathered at the neighborhood center to discuss issues related to

flood preparedness and response. According to two participants:

We know that flood season starts from September each year. Therefore, the topic that is most discussed by our members is how to prepare ourselves for responding to the flood. We start our discussion on flood preparedness two or three months ahead. We talk about how to respond to flooding that might occur.

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In order to manage the crisis, we prepared by planning to respond to the needs that came with flooding. We planned where to get the tents and how to set them up. We collected the information of potential partners that could provide us the tents. We needed to know how many tents we could get. Then, we needed to think ahead, in case all residents needed to evacuate, how we should manage the space in the shelter (for example, how many families would be accommodated in one tent?).

Internal Support

Resources are important in times of disasters because they are used to support adaptation

or enhance ability to deal with disaster impacts (Paton, 2006; Buckle, 2006). In Chapter 5, it was

argued that availability of resources from multiple organizations and locations was one factor

that contributed to the resilience of the local government (the Office of Nakhonsawan City

Municipality). The same argument applies at the neighborhood level. According to the focus

group interview, these neighborhoods relied on two types of sources of resources: internal and

external supports.

Assets and skills possessed by community members affect a community’s adaptive

capacity (Pooley et al., 2006). These assets and skills can be viewed as resources available within

the neighborhoods and can be called internal support. In this case study of the three strong

neighborhoods, internal support is a conceptual theme used to describe any kind of support

provided by members of the affected neighborhoods. These supports included goods, food,

equipment, materials, labor, and expertise. During a crisis time, internal supports (from

residents) are primary sources of resources for resilience because they are available within the

neighborhoods and, hence, ready to be mobilized. Internal support found in these strong

neighborhoods took many forms. For example, during the crisis, residents of these

neighborhoods volunteered to perform many response tasks. According to one municipal officer:

When their neighborhoods were inundated due to levee break, resident volunteers came out to help with response.

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Most focus group participants provided responses similar to the above opinion. They said that

residents volunteered to perform community patrol, moving and laying sandbags, providing mass

care, and performing other flood-related response tasks:

Once we got all these materials we used our own people to do the job. Our people came out to fill sandbags and lay them over the levee. Some people volunteered to move sandbags using their own motor tricycles. We also arranged some people to watch over the levee. Our people volunteered to help with different tasks. Some people helped make and lay sandbags on the levee while others volunteered to prepare food for us all. We had one gentleman acting as the head of this patrol mission and male teenagers were team members. We asked our people to fill sandbags and lay them over and around the levee to reinforce it. We used our own people to work in response operations. Some evacuees became emergency workers and volunteers.

Figure 14. Neighborhood members volunteered to work on area protection efforts (Office of Nakhonsawan City Municipality, 2011).

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Internal support can also take the form of providing equipment/materials and donating money to

support response operations. According to two respondents:

All these vehicles were supported by our people for free. Everyone tried to help with anything he/she had or could do. For example, some people provided boats or tricycles for moving sandbags while some people gave money for buying materials.

Some residents supported the operations by providing expertise or special skills. One respondent

noted:

During the response, we had one guy who was very good at using information technologies. He helped us by tracking information about flood situations and keeping us updated. Such information was very helpful to our day-to-day operations.

External Support

Although most of the resources used in the response could be mobilized from within the

neighborhoods, support also came from sources outside the affected neighborhoods, which also

contributed to resilience. A disaster of this magnitude can create a prolonged response operation

that might be challenging for the neighborhoods to rely only on their own internal resources.

Consequently, the capacity of local authorities, nonprofits, economic actors, as well as other

citizen groups outside the affected neighborhoods, was also recognized as an important source of

resilience (Gilbert, 2010).

In this case study of the three strong neighborhoods that formed a cooperative effort to

fight flooding, the researcher found that external support was used to strengthen their response

efforts. External support in this case study refers to aid or assistance provided by organizations

from outside these neighborhoods. Specifically, three groups of organizations played central

roles, including government agencies, private-for profit and non-profit organizations, and citizen

groups from other municipalities, provinces or regions. Support from these sources included

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goods, food, labor/personnel, equipment/materials, or even, money. Data obtained from the

focus group interview illustrate how important these sources of support are to promoting

response capacity of these strong neighborhoods.

When asked if they encountered any problems or if they had enough resources for

response, some participants noted that they did not have any big problems because they received

support from local governmental organizations when requests were made. Governmental

organizations included the office of the municipality, provincial administration organization

(PAO), military base, Nakhonsawan office of non-formal education, and the Provincial Water

Works Office. Access to these organizations was accomplished either directly from the

neighborhoods or indirectly through local politicians. According to some participants:

If we wanted more vehicles to assist in evacuation, we requested to the office of the municipality. They sent some vehicles to us. We asked the office of the municipality to give us materials that we needed to protect our neighborhood such as crushed rock, sacks, and sand. We coordinated with the office of the municipality when we needed sand, crushed rock, sacks, vehicles or anything necessary for flood prevention and response operations. We collected all the information and made a request to the office of the municipality. If they could not provide water to us, the request was sent to provincial administration organization (PAO). Requests for tents or water to the PAO were made through the member of PAO who was responsible for our area. We also got two boats for use in response operations from Nakhonsawan provincial administration organization and another two from the office of the municipality. That was enough for us. We also had a backup plan. In case we could not contact the office of the municipality and the PAO, which were located in the mainland, as the roads may not be passable, in such cases we made a request to other organizations located in the other side of the Chao Praya River. These organizations included Jiraprawat Military Base, Nakhonsawan office of non-formal education, and the Provincial Water Works Office. Thus, if we were cut off from the mainland municipality, we could still get help from organizations in the other side of the municipality.

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In some cases, personal connections facilitated the process to access and obtain external support.

According to one respondent:

My dad is a military officer. I asked him if the military base offered any assistance program. He told me that his workplace set up a task force for helping people during the flood crisis. So, I used the information that we had to make a request for help and sent it to them. After receiving our request, they sent 20 military officers, food, essential supplies, some equipment and other materials to help us.

Figure 15. The Regional III Military Base sent military officers to support response operations of these neighborhoods (Office of Nakhonsawan City Municipality, 2011).

Some focus group participants added that they received support from local private organizations

such as clubs and associations. They stated:

Sometimes help was from private sector, clubs, and associations. We received continued supports from these organizations during the flood. We received help from Rotary.

Some said that technical and financial support was obtained from non-profit organizations from other provinces such as Bangkok. They noted:

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We got some money from the Community Organizations Development Institute or CODI. We used that money to buy plywood and other materials to make wooden platforms so that people could sleep on them. We also made tables for evacuees could put their belongings. We got financial and technical assistance from Community Organizations Development Institute (CODI) and Thai Health Promotion Foundation. We used these resources to solve the problems we faced.

Individuals and group of citizens from other provinces or regions were also another important

source of assistance. According to two respondents:

We got some dry food and essential supplies from donors who travelled up north. Last year I got a lot of phone calls from my friends in this CODI network. They sent us rice, food, water, and other commodities. We got more than enough so we shared them to other neighborhoods.

Crisis Adaptability

If a neighborhood is viewed as one type of social organization, flexibility and adaptability

are required if it is to be successful in performing tasks in highly uncertain circumstances

associated with a disaster (Wildavsky as cited in Bruijne et al., 2010, p. 22). In Chapter 5, it was

argued that managerial adaptability is one factor associated with resilience at the governmental

level. The same argument applies to neighborhoods. The ability of neighborhoods to adapt to a

crisis (or crisis adaptability) is also an important contributor to resilience of these strong

neighborhoods.

Crisis adaptability refers to the ability of members of these strong neighborhoods to adapt

to changed circumstances. It captures the ability of these neighborhoods to improvise in

response, to adapt to live with the crisis (adjusted their minds to accept the changes caused by

flooding and temporarily adjusted their daily activities to fit that changes), and to be able to

create new tools or methods for addressing problems associated with the flood. Sometimes it also

means the ability to establish special functions that do not exist in normal time.

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The following interview excerpts provide evidence of crisis adaptability that helped these

strong neighborhoods survive the 2011 flood crisis. During the focus group interview, when

asked to share their experience with the flood crisis, problems encountered when living with it

and why they were capable of dealing with such a disaster, many respondents stated that living

with flooding was not a big problem for them because they could adapt to live with it and knew

how to react to the changed circumstances. According to respondents:

I think people know how to behave when flooding happens. They know how to help each other and know how to deal with such a crisis. It happens spontaneously. At least, we have gained a lot of experience from dealing with floods. So whenever it comes, we know how to deal with it. Like I said it happened spontaneously. Flooding was fun because people could make money from providing water taxis (using their boats) and catching fish for meals and for selling to other neighborhoods. Some people even grew water vegetables using foam (or used-vehicle tires) as planting pots. When the water came, these foam planting pots floated in water. These vegetables grew very well during flooding. Thus, we had our own natural kitchen. Since we live by the river, we have to find the way to deal with this repeated problem. If we want to survive, we must learn how to deal and live with it. In case prevention effort failed and the water came in our areas, we had to adapt ourselves to live with it.

An officer from the Provincial Department of Irrigation also provided a consistent response:

Our province is located by the rivers and the people get used to it. They live with water for many generations. Since we live by the rivers, most houses are two-story. Each family has a boat. People adjust their ways of life to live harmoniously with nature. They have two jobs. During normal time, they do farming but during flooding season they do fishery. They can live with flooding.

In terms of response operations, their ability to improvise allowed them to fulfill the needs of

evacuees in shelters and continue to perform other response tasks such as levee and community

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patrols, neighborhood protection, and water draining using whatever resources they had at hand.

Some respondents stated:

We did not have many problems about meals. We had sufficient meals because we knew how to cook enough food from what we had at hand. We knew how to mix this with that. Some vegetables were growing very well in floodwater. We also had a plenty of fish because fish came with floodwater. We used water vegetables and fish to prepare meals for our evacuees. We used tricycles and motorcycles to perform levee patrols and to move equipment and materials used in flood prevention and water draining efforts. We also created many activities within shelter area to reduce stress of evacuees. Our evacuees could watch movies, Thai traditional dramatic performance, comedy, and cartoons. We used the community’s projector screen that we had in our community center as a movie screen. We also organized boat racing between donors and evacuees. We used flooded area in front of our shelters as a racing place. It was very fun and we all enjoyed it. These activities helped our people reduce their stress. Children also had a lot of fun. Most of the people living in our neighborhoods had boats. These boats were used as taxis for transporting people, materials, and commodities

Finally, crisis adaptability of these strong neighborhoods is also reflected in their ability to create

functions that did not exist during normal times, such as community patrol, or the ability to

reestablish a temporary organization critical for effective response, such as an ad hoc center,

which was once devastated. According to representatives of these strong neighborhoods:

One problem that arose following flooding and after all people evacuated their residences was looting. They were some outsiders trying to steal things from our temporarily abandoned residences. Thus, we established a team to perform community patrol. We used boats to perform this task. This community patrol team worked very hard. They worked in day and night shifts. They ensured safety and security in our neighborhoods. Two gentlemen served as team leaders of this mission and teenagers from our three neighborhoods volunteered to join as team members. Initially, our ad hoc center for response was set up by the river. Later, when the levee failed allowing water in the river entered our neighborhoods, it was devastated. However, the new ad hoc center was established right away at the foothills where our neighborhood shelters were set up.

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Figure 16. A neighborhood patrol or neighborhood watch team was established during the crisis to prevent looting and ensure safety and security (Office of Nakhonsawan City Municipality, 2011).

Pre-disaster Social Cohesion

Community cohesion is one condition that facilitates resilience of a community (Lahad,

2008). Cohesion in this research refers to a social condition that exists in the neighborhoods

before the occurrence of an extreme event that promotes a coherent effort, which is necessary for

dealing with the overwhelming impacts of a disaster and managing an extended response

operation.

While social cohesion has long been documented in response to natural disasters (e.g.,

Fritz, 1961), it should be noted that some disaster sociologists have suggested that technological

disasters are more likely to create conflict and corrosion rather than unity (Ritchie and Gill,

2007; Gill and Picou, 1998; Freudenburg and Jones, 1991; Cuthbertson and Nigg, 1987).

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Pre-disaster social cohesion is a very clear theme that emerged from the focus group

interview, which contributed to a more effective neighborhood response. This kind of cohesion

is characterized by a state of being connected, being a unified whole, or sticking together. It

describes the strength of relationship among members, how well members of these strong

neighborhoods were connected to each other, and their ability to create a unified whole during

the crisis.

In this case study, pre-disaster social cohesion was found to be characterized by various

actions or behaviors and played an important role in promoting a strong response capacity of

these neighborhoods. In the focus group interview, some respondents stated that positive prior

disaster relations such as brotherhood, regular contact with each other, and unity of all the people

allowed cooperative actions to exist during times of crisis. According to respondents:

Unity of all the people living in this village helped us through a crisis. We helped each other. Although the village was divided into three separated neighborhoods, our people continued to keep in contact with each other as usual. Our relationship is not changed, we are a brotherhood. We feel like we are still living in the same village or community. So, when something bad happened, people from the three neighborhoods came out to help each other. People in our neighborhoods contact each other and share things that happened in life. This has created a close and long lasting relationship between all of us. When something bad such as a disaster happens, people provide good cooperation and support to each other because they have shared the same experience and have close relationship.

Other community characteristics that signify the existence of pre-disaster social cohesion in these

strong neighborhoods include closeness of neighborhood members, place attachment, meeting

with each other at a neighborhood center on a regular basis, and knowing each other very well.

According to respondents:

All residents in this neighborhood are close to each other. We are like a brotherhood.

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We have never thought to move out because we were born here and we wanted to die here too. We do not want to go anywhere. We want to stay here and fight flooding together. We meet at this village center at the end of each day. We chat and share stories, news and information with each other. We know each other very well. Everyone knows each other. This community saving fund meeting is a place to communicate with members not only about financial issue but other important issues like how to deal with the crisis that might occur and how to get people involved in the response effort. We used this community saving fund meeting as a place for discussing flooding-related issue.

Finally, this study also found that pre-disaster social cohesion did not only allow for good

cooperation (cooperative action) to happen, it also elicited active and supportive behaviors from

the people, their willingness to participate and help, and created a shared perception of risk

and/or a common definition of disaster agent and impacts. Some respondents stated:

Our people were very active and willing to work together to help ourselves. Our people were willing to help with anything we asked for. They were very kind. It was because we had good people in the neighborhoods that made us strong and were able to deal with the flood. Everyone was very supportive. What made us all so supportive and worked together very well was that we faced the same problem. Since we got the same problem, people in the three neighborhoods were willing to help each other because if they did not help they would be affected by the flood anyway. The most important thing was that we faced the same problem. Flooding created problems to us all.

Summary of Chapter

This chapter identified and discussed several important factors that contributed to the

resilience of neighborhoods affected by the floods. During the disaster, these neighborhoods

formed a cooperative effort, going so far as to refer to themselves as “strong neighborhoods.”

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Among the most critical contributing factors to neighborhood resilience are self-reliance, internal

and external resources, preparedness, crisis adaptability, cooperation, and social cohesion.

Taken together, these factors strengthened the neighborhoods impacted by the floods and

contributed in important ways to an effective response. The final chapter summarizes the major

findings of the study, elaborates its important conceptual and practical implications, discusses its

limitations, and identifies areas for future research.

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CHAPTER 7

CONCLUSION

Summary of Dissertation

The emergence of community resilience as a new research area in the field of emergency

management has gained attention from both practitioners and scholars because it has the

potential to inform policy makers and residents living in disaster-stricken communities about

how to respond to a disaster successfully and recover from it more quickly. One important

question often asked in resilience studies is what constitutes adaptive capacity of a community

affected by a disaster. This question is not clearly answered due in part to the lack of empirical

research. This dissertation provides some empirical evidence that helps us better understand the

factors that create resilient capacity at both local government and neighborhood levels.

To discover what constitutes resilience of a disaster-stricken community, qualitative

research methods were employed, including in-depth interviews with key representatives from a

variety of organizations and a focus group interview with residents from affected neighborhoods.

These research participants were actively involved in the flood response operations in

Nakhonsawan City Municipality, Nakhonsawan Province, Thailand in 2011. Several conceptual

themes emerged from the data showing the factors that created response capabilities of the flood-

stricken community in Thailand. Specifically, this dissertation found that disaster response

capacity of the local government (Nakhonsawan City Municipality) was attributable to the

following contributing factors: (1) the availability of (and accessibility to) governmental and

non-governmental resources from both within and outside its administrative boundary; (2) the

ability to adapt its organizational management procedures and/or managerial practices to fit the

rapidly-changed operational environment associated with the disaster; (3) the ability of a leader

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to manage the crisis and inspire subordinates; (4) the quality of emergency management

workforce; (5) the ability of all stakeholders to share knowledge and learn from each other; (6)

preparedness of related organizations; (7) organizational integration; and (8) sectoral integration.

Equally interesting is the discovery of how the three neighborhoods were able to respond

to the same crisis effectively even though they were cut off from the mainland municipality.

Based on data presented in this dissertation, these strong neighborhoods were successful in flood

response because: (1) they had an attitude of self-reliance, which translated into self-reliant

action/behavior; (2) they cooperated fully with adjacent neighborhoods in flood response efforts;

(3) they learned from locally accumulated knowledge (local wisdom); (4) they anticipated and

planned well and long before the event; (5) they were able to mobilize resources available within

the neighborhoods (internal support); (6) they managed to gain access to external support; (7)

they were able to improvise in the response, adapt to live with changed circumstances, and create

new tools for addressing problems; and (8) they ensured the existence of pre-disaster social

cohesion among participating neighborhoods.

Conceptual Implications

While providing empirical evidence that helps strengthen theories and findings of

previous studies, this dissertation has illuminated the multi-dimensional nature of the concept of

community resilience. Disaster management scholars from various disciplines have argued that

community resilience to disaster is a multi-dimensional concept, and findings from this research

support such an argument. Specifically, while previous studies discuss resilience of individuals,

places, and inter-governmental response networks, this research introduces the concept of

resilience of local government and resilience of neighborhoods, two important constituent parts

of a community. This multi-dimensional aspect of resilience implies that resilience can be

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viewed as a set of characteristics or capacities of any type of social unit and, hence, when doing a

research on this area or discussing the concept, disaster management researchers should make it

clear that they are referring to resilience of individuals, places, inter-governmental response

networks, local governments, or neighborhoods.

Findings from this research also have implications for the understanding of what

constitutes a resilient community. It is argued in this dissertation that different social units differ

in terms of their nature and structure and, hence, they may depend on different sets of specific

factors to be resilient. Findings from this research provide a clear example. That is, while the

local government (as a formal, leading response organization), relied on a variety of

organizational tools (e.g., leadership, working procedures, professionally trained workforce,

other managerial practices) and formal mechanisms of disaster management information

dissemination and knowledge sharing (e.g., a provincial meeting, organizational training) to

strengthen its response capacity, the three strong neighborhoods had less formal ways of resource

mobilization and information dissemination (e.g., resident volunteers, traditional and simple

methods of resource sharing, word-of-mouth way of recruiting volunteers and eliciting support).

They also tended to utilized locally accumulated knowledge (e.g., local wisdom, traditional

coping strategies), which already proved to be effective in past similar events, to guide their

behaviors or actions. Researchers should be aware of the possibility that, to be resilient, different

social units may require different types of factors.

Findings of this research also have another implication for those trying to develop models

that help explain community resilience. Scholars and researchers from different fields have

attempted to develop models and identify factors that constituted disaster resilience in their

studies. For example, Paton et al. (2001) developed a model that summarized the relationship

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between vulnerability, employment, risk perception and psychological resilience. Tobin and

Whiteford (2002), adapted from several pieces of disaster research, developed a model of healthy

and resilient communities in hazardous environments. Paton (2006) created the model of

multilevel resilience that showed factors or resources for resilience at personal, community, and

institutional levels. Finally, Cutter et al. (2008) introduced the disaster resilience of place

(DROP) model, which was designed to improve comparative assessments of disaster resilience at

the local or community level. Such previous models were developed to help us better explain or

understand disaster resilience. This dissertation has set the stage for refined measures of

resilience in future studies. That is, some new conceptual themes emerged from the data of this

research imply that there are some other factors not previously identified that scholars might

need to consider incorporating them into their models. Refining measures and incorporating new

factors into existing models may help us gain more insights about community resilience.

Practical Implications

This research has the potential to provide useful knowledge, which can be used by

organizational leaders, emergency management planners in the local governments, and members

of neighborhoods to promote their response capacity. Some practical benefits are as follows.

First, leaders of any emergency management organizations should start looking at

themselves and ask if they are doing a good job on leading their subordinates in times of crisis.

This research shows that leadership is very important to the success of disaster response. A great

crisis leader is not only knowledgeable about crisis management, he or she has to also be able to

inspire subordinates to work to the best of their ability and to be happy at work.

Second, organizational leaders and local emergency management planners should

continue conducting general preparedness activities (e.g., reserving emergency saving funds,

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training personnel and residents, checking functionality of equipment and facilities, and making

sure the availability of materials). Also needs to be recognized is the potential of the people and

other public organizations within and outside the administrative boundary of the affected

community. They can be sources of resources that affected community can use to strengthen its

capacity. Thus, some types of mechanisms to ensure availability and accesses to these sources of

resources need to be pre-established.

Finally, maintaining organizational and sectoral integration is important for disaster

response as effective intra- and inter-organizational cooperation can be achieved. Organizational

integration helped different departments within the office of the municipality work together well

in organizing response effort and mobilizing its resources. This internal integration may be

created by employing some types of human resource management tools (e.g., job rotation, cross-

functional team/project assignment) or organizational development activities (e.g., team

building, inter-departmental training). These activities would nurture positive social

environment within an organization.

Sectoral integration enhanced response operations because it not only improved the

process of working together, but also facilitated negotiations and talks among disagreeing

parties, which helped prevent or lesson serious social conflicts. In the case of Nakhonsawan City

Municipality, although there was no sign of serious social conflicts during the response, few

disagreements or minor conflicts related to choices of flood response did occur. Such minor

conflicts were often caused by disagreements of residents in some areas on the building of flood

barriers. For example, according to the report of lesson learned written by Dr. Pinyo Niroj

(former member of Nakhonsawan Municipality council), some residents did not want the office

of the municipality build flood barriers in their residence area (Niroj, 2012). Such reactions

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prevented municipal employees from performing their tasks and delayed floodwater prevention

operations. However, after several negotiations and with some warranted relief measures, these

residents agreed with the municipality’s response strategies and allowed workers to continue

performing their tasks. Thus, to lessen such minor conflicts in the future, public administrators

need to ensure the existence of sectoral integration. Sectoral integration may be developed

through such activities as community/neighborhood engagement, inter-agency, inter-sector

disaster training and other types of social events.

Members of neighborhoods can also consider utilizing some findings of this research to

promote their adaptive capacity. First, to gain more and a variety of resources, to strengthen its

capabilities and offset weaknesses, an affected neighborhood should cooperate fully with

adjacent neighborhoods in an effort to deal with a disaster. Second, neighborhood leaders and

members should ensure the existence of social cohesion before the occurrence of a disaster. Pre-

disaster social cohesion within one neighborhood and among adjacent neighborhoods makes it

easier for them to form a cooperative effort, to work in partnership and share resources with each

other. Next, neighborhood leaders and members should continue undertaking neighborhood-level

preparedness activities such as assessing risk and vulnerabilities, evaluating needs in times of

crisis and pre-identifying possible solutions and potential sources of resources, assistance or

support. Finally, neighborhood leaders should recognize the potential of local wisdom in helping

them cope with the impacts of disaster effectively. This research has shown that some local

knowledge, culture/norms, practices, and experience of human adaptation to locally

environmental threats can inform useful strategies for response. Thus, neighborhood leaders and

members should consider using such knowledge to educate their fellow residents and, in the long

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run, think about how to keep such knowledge and pass it on to the next generations in the most

sustainable way.

Limitations and Suggestions for Future Research

While this research provides a richly detailed description of disaster resilience in one

community, there are at least two limitations that should be taken into account when interpreting

the results. First, this is a study of one successful case, conducted in a city municipality.

Although the researcher examined both resilience of local government and three strong

neighborhoods, all these units of analysis were located in the same administrative location (in

Nakhonsawan City Municipality). This is an important point to be considered when interpreting

the results. In Thailand, there are generally three types of municipalities. They are city

municipality, town municipality, and sub-district municipality. These administrative entities are

different in terms of their sizes of population, area, budget, geographical features, availability

and effectiveness of draining infrastructure, to name a few. These factors may also affect the

capacity of municipalities to respond to massive floods. Readers need to be careful when

interpreting the results because this research may only reflect disaster response capacity of one

type of municipality (city municipality) and might not be able to generalizable to other two

smaller kinds of municipality (town municipality and sub-district municipality).

Another limitation is related to case selection. This research was conducted in a very

successful case of flood response. Thus, results may be generalizable to only similar cases or

only to cities that were perceived by their citizens, media and outsiders as successfully responded

to the same flood crisis. In a case that is less successful, or even a failure, there may be another

perspective or interesting story that may have some implications for community resilience. In

addition, failure or less success in flood response may be attributable to other factors, not simply

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because they do not possess such qualities or characteristics identified by this research as factors

for resilience. Again, readers should be careful when interpreting the results of this study.

To facilitate greater generalizability of research findings, researchers should consider

including other two types of municipalities into their studies. As noted earlier, the three types of

municipalities (city, town, and sub-district) are different in many aspects. Thus, it would be

interesting to research the factors that generate resilience of each of these local governments who

experienced the same flooding event. Research that includes cases from all types of

municipalities may answer a question of whether factors for resilience of these municipalities are

different or they are just similar. These findings would provide more insight about community

resilience.

Another suggestion would be to include other successful cases. Examining other

municipalities that were successful in responding to the same crisis would allow us to make a

comparison and to see whether they relied on the same factors for resilience or not. It would also

be interesting to examine cases that showed failure or were less successful in flood response

and/or recovery in the next studies. This would allow us to examine what caused failure or less

success in those municipalities. Specific research questions would be: what caused failure in

community’s flood response? What made these municipalities less successful in flood response?

Did they do the same as those successful communities did in response to the same disaster? Are

there any similarities or differences between those who were successful and those that failed?

Findings of research directed by these questions would help us confirm what have already found

in this research and in other previous empirical studies and, of course, to understand more about

community resilience.

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APPENDIX A

INTERVIEW GUIDE

131

Part I. General Information

1. Please tell me the name and the missions of the organization at which you are currently

working?

2. What’s your name and position or title?

3. What is your normal role in your organization? (Please tell me your day-to-day duties)

4. Is emergency management one of your day-to-day duties? If so, what is your role in

emergency/disaster management?

5. During the flood crisis, what were the overall activities you (your department/organization)

undertook?

Part II. Qualities or Characteristics of Community Resilience

(“You” refers to the participant and his or her department/organization)

1. Incident Management, Lives and Property Protection during Response

1.1 When you received the information about the Nock-Ten tropical storm and the floodwaters

were approaching the municipality, what did you? How did you respond to this news?

1.2 When the mass of water from the north arrived in the municipality, what did you do? What

actions did you take to respond to the floodwaters?

1.3 When the floodwaters broke the floodwalls and inundated Nakhonsawan Municipality, how

did you respond?

*Please describe the actions/activities you undertook, your roles and responsibilities, and the

resources you provided (in detail)*

2. Social Conflict/Disagreement and the Solutions

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2.1 Was there any conflict/disagreement among communities or community members occur

during the flood response? How did you deal with the disagreements? How did you maintain

social cohesion during the response?

3. Recovery

3.1 When did the recovery start? How did you begin your recovery operation? What activities

did you undertake to facilitate recovery? Did you do this by your own personnel, resources,

equipment, and facilities? Did you cooperate with other organizations in an effort to recover

from the floods?

*Please describe the actions/activities you undertaken, your roles and responsibilities, and the

resources you provided (in detail)*

Part III. Factors or Circumstances that Generate/Sustain Community Resilience

1. Psychological Factors

1.1 If you were to describe a sense of community and place attachment of people in this

Municipality, what would you say: high, moderate, or low? Why would you say so? How do you

think a sense of community and people’s attachment to community help the municipality to deal

with the floods?

1.2 Personally, how much were you confident that Nakhonsawan Municipality as a whole has the

capacity to effectively address disaster demands and improve post-disaster lives of the people

through the concerted efforts: very confident, moderately confident, or least confident? Why?

2. Social-Capability and Social Capital Factors

2.1 If you were to describe the ability of community’s members to work together to identify

needs created by the floods and determine ways to meet those needs, what would you say: high,

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moderate, or low? Why would you say so? How do you think the ability of community’s

members to work together helps the municipality to deal with the floods?

2.2 Have you included residents and community members in your decision and policy making

about flood response and recovery? If so, describe the process of inclusion?

2.3 If you were to describe the level of citizen engagement in disaster management policies and

activities, what would you say: high, moderate, or low? Why would you say so?

2.4 How do you think inclusion and active participation of community’s members in disaster

management policies and activities help the municipality to deal with the floods?

2.5 If you were to describe the role and engagement of citizens, voluntary and community

organizations in flood response and recovery, what would you say: significant, moderate, or

limited? Why would you say so? How do you think the engagement of citizens, voluntary and

community organizations help the municipality to deal with the floods?

2.6 If you were to describe relationship between the villages/neighborhoods, municipal office,

community organizations such as clubs, associations, faith-based organizations as well as

businesses within the municipality, what would you say: strong, moderate, or weak? Why would

you say so? How do you think the relationship of these organizations help the municipality to

deal with the floods?

3. Managerial and Organizational Factors

3.1 If you were to describe the role of local leaders in helping the municipality to respond to and

recover from this crisis, what would you say: significant, moderate, or limited? Why would you

say so? How do you think local leaders help the municipality deal with the floods?

3.2 If you were to describe the role of emergency manager, professionals and workers in helping

the municipality to respond to and recover from this crisis, what would you say: significant,

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moderate, or limited? Why would you say so? How do you think emergency manager,

professionals and workers help the municipality deal with the floods?

3.3 If you were to describe the role of mitigation measures and preparedness practices in helping

the municipality to respond to and recover from this crisis, what would you say: significant,

moderate, or limited? Why would you say so? How do you think mitigation measures and

preparedness practices help the municipality deal with the floods?

3.4 If you were to describe the role of cooperation with other municipalities, provincial offices,

and other regional agencies in helping Nakhonsawan Municipality to respond to and recover

from this crisis, what would you say: significant, moderate, or limited? Why would you say so?

How do you think cooperation with other municipalities, provincial offices, and other regional

agencies help Nakhonsawan Municipality deal with the floods?

3.5 If you were to describe the role of communication with community members and other

entities in helping the municipality to respond to and recover from this crisis, what would you

say: significant, moderate, or limited? Why would you say so? How do you think communication

with community members and other entities helps the municipality deal with the floods?

4. Cultural, Value, and Local Knowledge Factors

4.1 If you were to describe the role of culture (e.g., Thai culture of collectivism or sacrifice

individual benefits for the sake of a whole community, Buddhism or religious beliefs), value

(local traditions, local ways of life), experience (past experience of disasters) and local

knowledge in helping the Municipality to respond to and recover from this crisis, what would

you say: significant, moderate, or limited? Why would you say so? How do you think culture,

value, experience and local knowledge help the municipality deal with the floods? What kinds of

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culture, experience, and local knowledge that helped Nakhonsawan Municipality successfully

respond and recover from the floods?

5. Infrastructural Factors

5.1 If you were to describe the role of lifelines and physical environment (e.g., electricity, water,

drainage systems, communication networks, telephone and Internet lines) in helping the

municipality to respond to and recover from this crisis, what would you say: significant,

moderate, or limited? Why would you say so? How do you think lifelines and physical

environment help the municipality deal with the floods? What kinds of infrastructures that

helped the municipality successfully dealt with this crisis?

Part IV. Conclusion

1. What has helped your community/municipality through this crisis? In your opinion, what

were the most important things that helped Nakhonsawan Municipality respond effectively to

and recover quickly from to this crisis?

2. Your additional opinions or suggestions on how to promote the capacity of a community to

deal with the future floods?

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APPENDIX B

IRB DOCUMENTS

138

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