Nimesh Dhungana (nimesh.dhungana@manchester.ac.uk)
How are post-disaster digital communities emerging and shaping the nature of humanitarian space and action?
Enabled by the growing proliferation of mobile technologies, online platforms and open source data, and dubbed by some as “Digital Humanitarianism” (1) or “Digital Disaster Communities (DDC)” (2), communities from disparate locales are increasingly acting as early-responders to humanitarian crises that may have until recently seemed distant and remote. Despite the increasing prominence of post-disaster digital communities, disaster and humanitarian scholars have been slow to theorise and critically examine their emergence, characteristics, and socio-political impacts. In my research, I have been investigating the politics of post-disaster digital organising; first as part of my PhD research in the wake of the 2015 Nepal earthquakes and, more recently, during the Covid-19 pandemic, through the Atlantic Equity Challenge-funded collaborative project with Accountability Lab, a Nepal-based youth-led organisation. Our emerging findings indicate three interrelated pathways through which digital communities are shaping humanitarian space and action.
First, digital communities are actively asserting their role in redefining how post-disaster humanitarian aid is mobilised and distributed and, in the process, reconfiguring the representation of the humanitarian crisis itself. The 2015 Nepal earthquakes witnessed the emergence of a range of digital volunteers who used crowdsourcing, crisis mapping, and infographics to establish their interpretation of the scale of the crisis, who deserves aid, where and in what forms. Such forms of digital politics of aid eligibility resonate with other post-disaster contexts, notably following the 2010 Haiti earthquake (2). In Nepal, though, the involvement of digital communities was not limited to the emergency response but also found their engagement in the latter stages of disaster recovery and reconstruction. As one example, Kathmandu Living Labs, a Nepal-based civic tech organisation, partnered with the National Planning Commission to collect data on the scale and intensity of the destruction of residential houses as part of the National Housing and Reconstruction Survey. Their ‘digital feedback’ initiative resulted in one of the largest post-disaster datasets, setting the evidence-based logics for the longer-term reconstruction, coupled with the conditions and eligibility for State-sponsored housing assistance. Likewise, during the COVID-19 pandemic, several youth groups resorted to online monitoring, for instance, to track the supply of medical supplies such as oxygen cylinders. In so doing, these online communities posed a newer set of questions about equity and inclusion in the governance of a health emergency.
Second, digital communities are increasingly redefining the arena of rights-based humanitarian action despite the authorities’ tendency to restrict people’s rights in the name of a coherent disaster response. Combining off-line community activism with community-based hotlines, community radios, and mobile feedback applications, in Nepal, a group of mobile monitors emerged and acted as ‘information agents’, safeguarding disaster-affected communities’ constitutionally guaranteed right to information concerning the nature of aid distribution (4). Such efforts to generate and transmit credible information also found their place in the wake of COVID-19. Notably, Shramik Sanjal, an online community of international migrants, actively utilised their Facebook account to dispel rumours and misinformation that they considered were exposing fellow migrants to the risk of infection. These myriad forms of digital organising, some spearheaded by those who are often considered ‘vulnerable’, represent a wider struggle to establish people’s ‘right to know’ and ‘be heard’ in the face of a major crisis.
Third, post-disaster digital communities are assuming a much more contentious and political role, centred on demanding accountability and justice from authorities for their failures in preparing for and responding to disasters. During both the 2015 Nepal earthquakes and COVID-19, online platforms such as Twitter (now X) and change.org were widely leveraged to serve as alert systems, laying bare the potential for corruption and abuse of power in the name of disaster response. Indeed, the deployment of online platforms to demand bottom-up accountability during COVID-19 was not limited to Nepal. In the UK, for instance, the survivors of COVID-19 and bereaved families put together online petitions, among other offline initiatives, to demand accountability from the government, providing a much-needed push for the formation of the ongoing UK COVID-19 Inquiry.
The growing intermingling of offline and online disaster communities represents the active reshaping of the humanitarian space, which was for a long time occupied and dominated by the international aid actors and the State but, in recent years, has become far more de-centred, contested and fluid (5). Even under politically restricted contexts, disaster survivors are resorting to data and digital platforms to deepen the values of transparency and trust in post-disaster recovery (6). At the same time, the rise of post-disaster digital communities has raised several questions that merit further investigation.
Research on data-driven civic initiatives has shown their tendency to overlook and even worsen socio-political inequalities due to their narrow fixation on leveraging open and ‘Big Data’ Fields (7). What are the larger socio-political conditions under which digital communities emerge and evolve post-disaster? Linked to this is also the question of the consequential value of these groups beyond their role as aid monitors, eligibility auditors and alert systems, as highlighted above. Can digital communities hold the power-holders accountable for their failure to prevent disaster, or mount a fair and equitable disaster response? These questions demand longitudinal and embedded studies that can trace the conditions under which they function, how they function and the socio-political consequences of their organising. Finally, while digital communities claim to help expedite post-disaster solidarity networks, how solidarity itself, defined as a socio-political practice of inclusion, reciprocity and peer-to-peer accountability, features in the internal workings of digital communities is far less known. In particular, whether or how the voices of those whom digital communities claim to ‘help’ are included in the design and deployment of digital or data-driven technologies remains under-examined. As disasters become more frequent and intense, and digital communities actively rely on data to shape humanitarian action, how data collected from vulnerable communities are protected from misuse is another concern that merits further investigation.
1. Meier P. Digital Humanitarians: How Big Data is changing the face of humanitarian response. Taylor & Francis; 2015.
2. Chaffee D. Digital Disaster Communities. In: Elliot A, Hsu EL, editors. The Consequences of Global Disasters. Routledge; 2016. p. 80–94.
4. Dhungana N. Doing Civil Society-Driven Social Accountability in a Disaster Context: Evidence from Post-Earthquake Nepal. Polit Gov [Internet]. 2020 Dec 10 [cited 2022 Oct 24];8(4):395–406. Available from: https://www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandgovernance/article/view/3154
5. Hilhorst D, Jansen BJ. Humanitarian Space as Arena: A Perspective on the Everyday Politics of Aid. Dev Change [Internet]. 2010 [cited 2024 Feb 19];41(6):1117–39. Available from: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-7660.2010.01673.x
6. Xu B. The Politics of Compassion: The Sichuan Earthquake and Civic Engagement in China. Stanford: Stanford University Press; 2017. 256 p.
7. Mulder F, Ferguson J, Groenewegen P, Boersma K, Wolbers J. Questioning Big Data: Crowdsourcing crisis data towards an inclusive humanitarian response. Big Data Soc [Internet]. 2016 Dec 1 [cited 2023 Jul 27];3(2):2053951716662054. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951716662054
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