"They don't understand how we feel": An affective approach to improving the 'best practice' of community-based post-disaster recovery

This thesis presents a critical investigation into the community-based approaches on post-disaster recovery, approaching the subject through the case of Japan after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. Community-based approaches form a part of the general participatory turn over the last decades, with the purpose of engaging citizens into decision-making processes by following four key principles: participation, empowerment, resilience and proximity. The popularity of these approaches has given rise to their status as the global 'best practice' in the field of development, and post-disaster recovery more specifically, thus warding further attention and investigation.

Despite the popularity of these approaches, I will show how community-based approaches often lead to inconsistent outcomes, and communal dissatisfaction toward the processes themselves remain prevalent. In Tohoku, this dissatisfaction was emphatically articulated by majority of the participants through the utterance kimochi ga wakaranai (they don't understand how we feel). The thesis therefore asks, why does dissatisfaction remain rife despite the adoption of community- based recovery in Tohoku? While many authors propose that this dissatisfaction is primarily a procedural problem leading from a gap between theory and practice, I argue that the problem is related to the epistemological and methodological starting points of recovery that divide recovery and trajectories for the future into endogenous and exogenous domains and discourses.

Where the exogenous discourse of the authorities emerged from motivations to understand how this disaster was able to take place and how in the recovery vulnerabilities that led to its onset could be minimised, for the locals it was the affective intensities of their personal experiences and intimate daily existence within the post-disaster landscape that drove their understanding of the events and desired shape for the future of their communities. Through the ethnographic data analysis, the research finds the dominant exogenous discourses did not resonate with their localised daily experience of the recovery, with the discrepancy in the visions creating tensions and dissatisfaction toward the recovery process and paradoxically distancing the communities from the 'community-based' recovery.