Disaster resilience among war-affected people resettled in Northern Sri Lanka: Challenges revisited

The occurrences of disasters around the world illustrate that communities are still vulnerable, and not sufficiently resilient, to natural and manmade disasters. Disaster resilience depends on the social fabric and capital of an affected community. The displacement of people caused by wars is a phenomenon that changes such adaptive capacity. During the last three decades, the Northern Province of Sri Lanka has been affected by the war between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Government of Sri Lanka. In May 2009, after the conclusion of the war, the Government of Sri Lanka took measures to resettle displaced people. This study aims to compare the level of resilience of two groups to floods: internally displaced persons (IDPs), who were resettled in 2010, and war-affected permanent communities that reside in the Northern Province. A sample of IDPs and local communities was chosen from the most flood-affected rural administrative divisions. Resilience levels were scored by using two groups of proxy indicators that represent bonding and bridging levels of social capital, according to the methodology that was implemented for the Social Capital Assessment Tool. Data were collected through questionnaires, interviews with key local leaders, and focus group discussions (FGDs). The results showed that IDPs and permanent local communities demonstrated significantly different levels of resilience to flood disasters. More specifically, local communities scored at higher levels for both social capital and resilience. The integration of IDPs into the social dynamics of local communities is possibly an essential step towards increasing resilience to flood disasters.