Social Transformation of the Tsunami Affected Fishing Community

This 9-page paper discusses the creation of the Social Transformation framework in Tsunami-affected villages in Cuddalore district in Tamilnadu, India. The author first explains that the Social Transformation framework combines psychological, social support, communication and educational methodologies to re-establish social support structures and processes. It empowers the community to actively engage in supporting each other by giving them the knowledge and resources they need, tied into local religious beliefs, community lifestyle and cultural traditions.

The paper describes the affect of the tsunami on 51 villages, 2 of which were completely wiped out, and the results of a needs analysis for the more than 99,000 people affected in this district, showing the loss of "neighbourhood relations ...and disintegration of social infrastructure, such as self help groups (SHG), anganwadis, mahila mandals, youth organizations, etc. with a high degree of social discontent". Into this situation of need came the influx of aid, which, according to the author, created the "paradox of abundance within privation." He further points out that "[r]econciling scarcity of the customary with a surplus of the unfamiliar creates a challenge that opens up the affected community to transformation."

In this post-disaster context, Academy for Disaster Management Education Planning & Training (ADEPT) began a community counsellor programme to bolster the psychosocial resources both within individuals and communities. In the environment of large amounts of external funding and intervention, ADEPT examined the potential for aid dependency and concluded that "the long term implications of this for sustainable
development of the affected communities were disastrous. Providing ad hoc assets without
community consultation and participation in analysing the potential impact on local
relationships, market capacity and the environment resulted in new social and power dynamics that threatened to undermine the social ecology and culture, increasing the likelihood of intercommunal
tensions in an already ethnically charged environment."


Opting to use community resources, ADEPT found that the reorganisation efforts opened the possibility to transform the fishing "communities'... power structures [that otherwise] tend to stabilize within fairly inequitable conditions and lead to perpetuating the cycle of rural poverty." It modified its programmatic approach to incorporate the various components of the transformational process into its programme, making use of personnel from the destabilised communities to help them access the communities' psycho-social domains: human capacity/capital, social ecology/capital, and culture and values (cultural capital). ADEPT also incorporated the elements of transformation: gender role transformation,
transformation of groups with specific vulnerabilities, social and economic empowerment,
environmental management, and local capacity building.


Further, having setup the psychosocial community counselling programme and then having overlayed the transformational strategies, ADEPT found that a "Social Transformation" framework emerged. The elements of the framework are vulnerability context, psycho-social domains, and transformational processes.


The framework helps the community to:

• understand the processes that influence the receipt or mobilisation of post-disaster
  support;
• identify methods of applying such influence;
• implement a long term plan to arrest decline in psycho-social and
  transformational resources;
• build fresh resources that substitute for those lost; and
• re-establish psycho-social and transformational patterns.

In conclusion, the author states: "Since it taps into existing community resources, the “social
transformation” framework minimizes dependence on external resources and has the advantage
of not needing the continued presence of the external agent of change."