by Zella Knight, NLIHC Board Member
Zella Knight: Hello Alessandra. I’m excited to get deep into your work regarding disaster recovery, relief, and climate resilience. I wanted to learn from a researcher’s perspective. It’s great to meet you. Let’s get started!
Many of my peers and I are students living the experience. For our residents and tenants, we often hear the term disaster justice, can you share how justice paradigm is defined in disaster recovery and climate change from your perspective?
Alessandra Jerolleman: Absolutely! Not to sidestep the question, but to a large extent, it is not defined. There are people working in this space that are trying to bring in principles of justice to disaster recovery. Unlike the environmental justice movement, which over time has built a literature of what justice means in that context, we haven’t done the same with climate and disasters. That is work that still needs to be done. When I’ve worked with community groups and agencies, one of the first things we start off with is asking impacted people how they would like to see justice understood and defined. There are two reasons for this, one being that representation and voice are key components of any justice approach. The second reason being that the outcomes are very different depending on how we define justice and how we measure progress. It is very easy to talk about justice and have a strategic vision that includes language around justice. It is much more difficult to operationalize it, to measure it, and to know if we’ve been successful.
We have seen groups like Texas Housers who heavily advocate for justice and lay clear principles of what might entail. I’ve tried to do a little bit of that in my work as well. We’ve seen the federal and state governments make calls to justice which have focused primarily on distribution, representation, and sometimes access. We have not seen as much of an effort to go beyond that. If you investigate the understandings of a justice paradigm, in philosophy for example, we could go beyond the basic Rawlsian questions of distribution, such as “who gets the goods?”, “who gets the bads?”, and “how do we decide?”. We could also go beyond that to ask what it means to be able to have justice that takes into account all relations. By that I mean thinking not just about human relations, but more of an indigenous or non-Western framing. We could think about justice across generations. We have seen a lot of youth ask society and the courts that in the climate space with varying levels of success. We also could think of Amartya Sen’s framing of wellbeing. What does it mean to have a life well-lived? If we look at the wellbeing indices, the United States does not do well compared to a lot of other nations because wellbeing encompasses access to safe housing, access to education, access to adequate and appropriate healthcare. Not just asking ourselves, “did everybody get a relatively equivalent provision of disaster recovery resources?”
When we’re thinking about justice, there’s also a question of justice for whom? And how is that defined? If we think about who we may collectively consider as having a right to a place, what is defined as justice is going to vary based on who we consider. For example, people who are unhoused have an equal right to a place as those who own homes or are tenants. Tenants who are in a cooperative arrangement may have equal rights to a place as those that are in federally subsidized public housing. This question of justice also hinges around whose rights, values, and personhood are being held up and respected in this space.
Zella Knight: That is very powerful. In your work, can you describe the four principles for disaster recovery and how this would benefit residents and tenant advocacy for disaster relief recovery and climate change?
Alessandra: When I was working on my book, “Disaster Recovery Through the Lens of Justice”, I looked to see what kind of frameworks were out there and being used, particularly in the climate space, in environmental justice, and by community organizers. I took that information and lumped them into four buckets and that’s where the principles came from. They are by no means all-encompassing and they were never intended to be more than a starting point for conversation.
The first principle is that just recovery requires the ability to exercise agency, to make free and informed choices that support an individual’s own personal well- being. There are a lot of barriers to practicing agency in disaster recovery. It is not possible to make free and informed choices if you don’t have all the information in an accessible and timely fashion.
One way this plays out in the disaster space is that we rarely know when and what decisions are going to be made in terms of funding, resources, etc. This is a strange moment in time to be having this conversation because so much is upended in the disaster space to begin with. Even before this moment, if there was a hurricane, it is not a disaster in a vacuum. It is a disaster event happening to people already under a lot of stress and strain from other prior events, such as social conditions, injustices, and inequities. It’s not as though it happens and is a blank slate.
For example, as a resident in Louisiana, if I am impacted by a storm, I need to make some decisions. Am going to try to repair the place I am living in with improvements to increase my safety? Am I going to try to elevate the home? Am I going to try to continue to carry insurance? Should I consider moving? Am I going to make decisions around trade-offs? I may wish to fully repair my home, but I can’t entirely afford the deductibles so I might make some trade-offs in how careful I am about certain things because I might prioritize feeding my family. All of these things are happening and it is stressful to make these decisions around your life because there will always be things you don’t know and are out of your control. If we’re going to be more just in recovery, we need to increase the information as best we can, so individuals can make the best decision for themselves.
To use myself as an example again, I would ideally need to know if there are going to be additional funds coming in from HUD, like CDBG-DR, and not wait several years to know if that’s going to happen. I would ideally have a pretty quick answer on whether I qualify for individual assistance and not have to go through multiple appeals to get there. I would ideally know how much my insurance payout would be and that payout would be fair and easy to access. If we want to practice agency, we need to know information. This has a bearing on mental health as well. One of the most stressful things for adults is the inability to fully exercise their agency.
We do have a lot of people whose ability to exercise agency is impeded. Another example is people who have been previously incarcerated, people with language barriers, people who identify as transgender. All of these individuals can run into barriers in regard to government programs and policies that are limiting the ability to exercise that agency.
The second principle is, just recovery begins with equality. To me, this is the most important principle because when we’re talking about beginning with equality, what we’re talking about is the principle, “Prima facia political equality”, which means only equality is inherently defensible. Any different or unique treatment needs to be justified by the discriminator. This is 100% the opposite of what we have done. We have built a bureaucratic process that forces individuals impacted by a disaster to prove why they are worthy of assistance. We are not asking the government or entities like FEMA to explain why only 20% of individual assistance payouts were made. We’re saying instead to individuals that it is their job to show that you are not defrauding the government and to demonstrate that you are a legal citizen.
We’re expanding this practice to nonprofits now as well, where we’re basically saying to nonprofits that receive federal funding that it is their duty to make sure this funding doesn’t make it to people who are not from this country. All these burdens that are imposed and people and communities make it just about impossible to really have justice in disaster recovery and it also helps to create a corrosive community.
We know that after disasters people tend to band together, even in the face of differences. This starts to erode when people feel like there has been discrimination. When it is unclear that your neighbor got assistance but you didn’t, or when you see such different timelines where one family is able to return home and other is not. These actions are key components of tugging apart a community. Individuals are being asked to prove their own deservedness. The implication there is that if you are not receiving assistance, it is because you are not deserving. Or vice versa, if I feel I am deserving and can’t pass these tests it is likely because the cheating by everyone else has made my life harder. There are ways the system tugs people apart when they need to band together to support recovery.
The third principle is, a just recovery harnesses community capacity. A large tension we have in our conversations about disasters and disaster justice lies in how we address vulnerability. Even well-meaning attempts to understand differential impact and risk can be harmful, especially where intersectionality might be placing people at a greater risk of harm or making access to resources more difficult. It is very challenging to map out communities and not just say, “this census block is really vulnerable because there are a lot of older single moms who speak English as a second language and they are below the poverty line.” Is there some truth in saying that we understand that a community with greater concentration of more people who have been traditionally rendered vulnerable by our societal decisions will need more attention and assistance? Sure. Do statistics hold true for every single individual? No. We know communities can have differing levels of social capital and resilience regardless of poverty and other factors. This does not mean we expect everybody to claw themselves out and be resilient.
Resilience is a word that a lot of communities I work with strongly dislike because it also implies that you as the resilient party should be able to get right back up no matter how many times you get hit. It never says, “why don’t we stop the hitting?” This question of community capacity asks us to start with what works in a community. What strengths do people have? Not simply to label a community as vulnerable and certainly to avoid the trap of making it appear as though all individual choices have created or exacerbated that vulnerability. When in fact, we know redlining continues to have impacts on property values. Community choices around where investments are made in infrastructure, which have to do with tax bases, have to do with a lot of other different factors. These factors often have some correlation to race, class, and other things that have created greater vulnerabilities.
To really harness that community capacity, it is important to acknowledge the existing patterns and histories and not place an objective metric on top of a history that’s already created differing levels of risk. Also, we need to treat people and communities like they are part of the solution, as though they do have a voice in deciding what their community needs, and as though recovery begins from their own needs and desires.
I will also say that there is a big difference between a mutual aid model and a charity model. We’ve seen mutual aid be very successful in communities. Mutual aid is sharing among equals. It is a recognition that we all have things to bring. Whereas in charity, which is used more in our current emergency management and disaster recovery model, gratitude is expected regardless of needs. Charity doesn’t allow for people and communities to exercise agency in what they need. It makes assumptions. It doesn’t work. Really listening to people is important.
The fourth and final principle is, just recovery requires equal access. Equal access to resources and programs doesn’t just mean that everybody can apply to each program. If you are only offering assistance tailored to homeowners after a disaster, that is not going to equally assist everyone. It’s the difference between thinking about equity and equality. Equal access is also about participation in the decision-making processes. It is participation in defining the problems, solutions, the government’s role. Without that, it is not possible for communities to effectively participate in their own recovery. Disaster recovery becomes its own disaster. The trauma around the bureaucratic violence perpetuated after disasters is in some cases as bad or worse than the experience people have with the actual disaster.
Zella Knight: Wow. Beautiful and powerful. You already leaned into my next and final question. Can you tell us what are some of the most effective solutions you see that can improve or change policies regarding post disaster relief and climate resilience and how do we engage residents/tenants in the implementation?
Alessandra: First and foremost: really listening to people. Not beginning from any sort of assumption that there is going to be any kind of cheating or malfeasance. For example, in disaster preparedness, one of the things communities are worried about is how will there be access to food or water? What happens if there is a prolonged power outage? Emergency management spends a lot of time and effort trying to stockpile, create warehouses, and plans, but it becomes really difficult to make sure that resources get to everybody who needs them. That’s been a big problem here in New Orleans.
One alternative that’s been proposed is providing people with non-perishable food and water at the start of hurricane season. They would hopefully have it in the event of a power outage during hurricane season. One of the concerns that gets raised when this idea is brought up is that people will misuse those supplies. Do I believe that every single person who received assistance would 100% store it properly? Wait to use it, remember where it is, and access it in the event of a disaster? No. But if a person is relying on that emergency water and food, that is a necessity and a different challenge that the government should be addressing in the first place. It reflects a deeper need that we should be addressing anyway.
The other piece that relates to this is when we think about disaster assistance, internationally, there are a lot of models that have shown that just giving people direct access to some amount of resources that they can spend as they see fit can lead to positive outcomes after an event. It is easier and more efficient. We tend to be so worried about cheating that we’ve created elaborate systems that take resources away from people.
For example, we have the DC metro system versus Germany’s metro system. In the DC metro, you pay to get in and you pay to get out, and this sometimes creates bottlenecks. These bottlenecks create a need for more staff, machines, and policing. Germany’s metro uses an honor system with some checking, so there is less of a bottleneck. Some percentages of riders do get away with the occasional free ride but there is spot checking and there is a hefty fine if you get caught. They feel that has disincentivized cheating enough that the small amount of loss to free riding actually is outweighed by the cost and time savings of the general efficiency of the system. We could choose something similar in disasters. We could make the choice of giving people assistance more quickly.
What is interesting about the United States, is that when we involve the private sector in disaster recovery, there is more evidence of additional costs through things like double billing than intentional fraud committed by individuals. When it comes to engaging residents and tenants in implementation, anything we can do to increase the voice that people have in a community around all decisions is important. Disasters don’t have to happen in a vacuum. People are dealing with a lot of day-to-day stressors. The more we can address the lack of affordable housing, tenant rights, and transportation challenges, the better the collective will be before and after a disaster. It’s going to reduce impacts and increase people’s resiliency (using that term in a more positive sense now!), than otherwise.
We need to have more inclusive and public local governance processes, including how budgeting is happening and how decisions are being made. We need to make sure we don’t have meetings that are ostensibly open to the public but don’t provide childcare, are hard to get to, and are during working hours. We should also make sure that tenants are invited to meetings where they will be heard and not ignored because the consultants have already decided what’s going to happen. The more we can expand true access to governance for everyone, including not just tenants and residents, but for people who are unhoused and others (e.g., youth), the more we can create real and effective solutions that will work for people and not just create more harm.
Zella Knight: Beautifully placed, Alessandra. Well thank you so much for the work that you do and saving lives. And thank you for spending time with me to articulate the needs, solutions, and challenges we’ve encountered. We appreciate you!