Who Holds the Reins? Gender, and International and Local Disaster Response

• In Event: The Politics of Disaster Response: COVID-19 and Beyond

Abstract

After Hurricane Maria struck Dominica in 2017, women were overrepresented in shelters and among uninsured people whose homes were unlivable. This reality is not unique to Dominica: women are often among those most vulnerable to disasters. Acknowledging this reality, international organizations (IOs) have sought to address gender inequality in their disaster response. They implement projects that support women farmers or give priority to female headed households. IOs rely on host-governments to provide such disaster assistance, and work with them to varying degrees to mitigate gender inequality. However, results vary. When do efforts to ameliorate post-disaster gender inequality succeed and when do they fail?
I argue that relationships between governments and IOs shape gender inequality via three factors: government restrictions, state-IO integration, and IOs’ understanding of local context. To do so, I leverage original multi-method fieldwork in Dominica, a Caribbean Island devasted by Hurricane Maria in 2017, which has seen diverging outcomes for women. Drawing on document review, participant observation, and in-depth interviews, I examine populations’ situated understandings of gender (in)equality. In doing so, I reveal key political processes that undergird gender inequality during disaster recovery and demonstrate how gender intersects with other vulnerabilities such as disability and income while contributing to emergent research on the effects of climate change on small island states and other vulnerable areas.

Author

• Valerie de Koeijer, Johns Hopkins University