Investigating Community Resilience in Bhaktapur District, Nepal

Abstract eng:
Following the Nepal, Gorkha, M7.8 earthquake on April 25, 2015 a research team of several academic and practitioner experts in earthquake engineering, community resilience, and risk reduction, spent a week in Nepal to document the impact the earthquake had in Bhaktapur and surrounding districts. Strategic goals of the recognizance team included ‘investigating recovery and resilience related issues’, along with the more traditional pursuits. Over the course of 8 days, two social scientists with the team collected information from 80 community members about cultural, psychological and social factors with implications for rebuilding and future disaster preparedness. Results from this rapid assessment highlight community perspective on the following topics: culturally specific disaster attributions, psychological distress, preferred means of coping, social support, community conflicts, livelihood implications and other economic impacts, and concerns with governance and corruption - providing a snapshot of the situation in the early aftermath of the earthquake. In partnership with a local Nepali organization, one of the reconnaissance team members, a social psychologist, was awarded a grant to investigate future disaster preparedness and recovery for 240 persons over a period of several months in two of the hardest hit communities in Bhaktapur district: Chhaling and Tathali. Although detailed findings from this intervention research will be reported elsewhere, some descriptive data from the work in Bhaktapur is used to augment findings from the rapid assessment. Results are situated within a larger body of literature on earthquake impacts and recovery. Suggestions are made for future research to further examine factors highlighted in this initial assessment.

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