Viable Futures for the Andaman and Nicobar Archipelago

The project deals with investigation viable future options for the indigenous population of the Andaman Nicobar archipelago after the 2004 tsunami disaster. The aim of the applicants research proposal is to generate scientific support for the planning, implementation and evaluation of reconstruction and development options for the indigenous population of the Andaman-Nicobar archipelago that maintain their social and cultural integrity, within a unique window of opportunity provided by the availability of substantial international funds. The research will provide a further case study for an emerging theory of sustainability transitions by using the new dynamics triggered as a consequence of the tsunami disaster to better understand the interplay of natural, cultural and institutional features in determining vulnerability and coping capacity of local socio-ecological systems. This case study is particularly relevant in consideration of the (destructive) fate foraging people commonly suffer when they become subject to outside influences. Methodologically, we strive for a more systematic link between functional tools (material and energy flow and land use analysis, MEFA) and tools dealing with meaning, human preferences and choice (ethnographic tools and stakeholder processes), or, in other words, develop methods to relate emic and etic descriptions in participative decision making.

The project RECOVER, under FWF`s translational component, was initiated largely to provide scientific support in the rehabilitation of an indigenous community, the Nicobarese, severely affected by the tsunami of December 2004. Researchers at the Institute of Social Ecology in Vienna had been engaged with the community for some years before the tsunami and had established friendly relations to them. The Nicobarese inhabit the Nicobar archipelago off the Indian coast. Largely subsistence, they lived off hunting, gathering, fishing, raising pigs and chickens, and producing copra (dried coconut) for the market which they bartered for commodities not otherwise available on their islands. The tsunami not only took away thousands of lives, destroyed their villages, material culture, and livestock, but also their resource base - the coconut trees and the coastal ecosystem on which they depended upon for food. Soon after the news of the tsunami, it became clear that there was an obligation on the part of science to offer its expertise. RECOVER collaborated with the Sustainable Indigenous Futures (SIF) fund founded in Austria immediately after the tsunami, and offered continuous advice on how to invest its resources on projects that were culturally appropriate and ecologically sustainable. The support to SIF ranged from rapid need assessments and urgent interventions, to building computer models to evaluate scenarios for the islands. The process was extremely challenging as the project had to keep apace with the ever-changing dynamics on the islands driven by overwhelming humanitarian aid. In our understanding, the humanitarian aid was rather inappropriate and unsustainable to a large extent and drove the people into heavy dependency on a continuous flow of resources from the outside, thus undermining their self-relying and self-organising capacities. The process we found ongoing on the islands led us to create the term `complex disasters` to describe a situation in which a natural disaster in its aftermath is aggravated by well-meant humanitarian interventions that in effect incapacitate the indigenous population to recover and find their way into a mode of living that could be sustained after termination of outside support. Scientifically, we had to diagnose a far-reaching incompatibility of the logics of humanitarian aid, and of sustainable development. Methodologically, we advanced in combining material, energy and land-use indicators with time-use, to analyze biophysical constraints and opportunities on various development options through computer modelling. As a result of SIF`s and RECOVER`s effort an Indian partner could be acquired. The Tata Institute for Social Sciences [TISS] in Mumbai is building on RECOVER`s results and will use it to strengthen institutions on the islands for the revival of livelihoods and self-organizing capacities necessary under the new framework conditions.