On August 26, floods hit Nepal’s Rasuwa, Nuwakot and Dhading districts, wiping away entire towns and communities. Roads and bridges were washed away, and telecommunications networks were down. The immediate focus was on rescuing people trapped under debris and providing relief to those affected. A month on, the focus has now shifted to rehabilitation, rebuilding and long-term recovery.
The Hindu spoke to Dr. Nimesh Dhungana, Senior Lecturer in Disaster Studies and Global Health at the University of Manchester’s Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute (HCRI), who studies disasters through the lens of governance, democracy and accountability, about recovery after the devastating flash floods. Dr. Dhungana describes himself as an accidental disaster researcher who started studying disasters after the 2015 Nepal earthquake. He also studied the Himalayan country’s response to the COVID pandemic. Edited excerpts:
Is there a difference between the way the government responded to the 2015 earthquake, the COVID pandemic and the recent flash floods?
The government has a sense of moral responsibility [to save lives] when a disaster of this scale strikes. One common element is that the state acts decisively and with the speed required in the aftermath of such disasters. It mobilises its emergency forces, led by the security forces. However, we are increasingly seeing that the state’s response is not matched by a sustained commitment to long-term recovery and reconstruction. That responsibility starts to fade, particularly when it comes to listening to affected communities and ensuring that their rights are protected during the long-term recovery and reconstruction process. It is about transparency, engagement with the affected population and ensuring that they have a say in the recovery and reconstruction process.
Your work suggests that disasters expose government failures that have built up, or existed long before the disaster itself. What do you mean by this?
I think there is a long-standing debate about what constitutes a disaster. The recent floods have also forced us to revisit this basic question: what is a disaster in the first place? One way of thinking about it is as an event that is often unpredictable and attracts considerable attention from national and international media, as the recent floods did.
Another way of thinking about a disaster is as a process. It is something that happens because of long-term vulnerabilities. Disasters are not caused by nature alone. It is a mixture of the two. I think there is a growing consensus that a disaster is more of a process than just an event. Unfortunately, it is more comfortable to think of a disaster as an event, something beyond our control. We saw that with the 2015 earthquake and the pandemic. This is not limited to Nepal; it is a wider issue. I think this is a problematic way of looking at disasters. It can absolve state actors of accountability. We need deeper introspection into the choices we make, our governance structures and institutions. We should adopt a more rights-based approach to disaster response and rethink how we address longstanding inequalities and injustices.
The state is often quick to respond to disasters, but its approach is usually centralised and top-down. This undermines the roles and responsibilities of local bodies, which are the frontline responders.
How do you balance the role of the local bodies and the federal government, especially when a massive disaster strikes a region, leaving the local communities wiped out?
It depends on the scale of the disaster. The flash floods in Nepal are unprecedented. Given the scale of the disaster, Nepal needs support from outside, not just nationally, but also internationally. However, this is no excuse for not involving local representatives in the process. Ward officials, elected representatives, local NGOs and community-based organisations, which are often at the forefront of disaster response, have greater knowledge of the local context. In the Rasuwa floods, questions have been raised about their role being undermined by the centralised, top-down disaster response.
Mobilising military and security forces for disaster relief is a way of centralisation. We need to think beyond security forces for the immediate response and recovery. We need to engage more civilian actors for immediate relief and in policy-making. We should empower the local government with resources, equipment and infrastructure to deal with disasters. In the longer term, policy-wise, local bodies need to have a say in answering the big questions, like how we resettle communities.
The problem is that, in Nepal and elsewhere, reconstruction tends to focus more on physical reconstruction, like building houses and other infrastructure. But they are often not aligned with community priorities. It also raises a deeper question: what does recovery mean? Is it just rebuilding houses, or is it a societal recovery? What if people don’t want to move from a certain place? How do we listen to their claims and choices? The local government can play a really important role here.
Your work says there is a difference between the community ‘having a voice’ and ‘having teeth’. What does that mean?
This also stems from a more rights-based approach to thinking about development and disasters. There’s a long-standing literature on the role of voice in this kind of difficult situation, going back to Amartya Sen’s work in famine prevention. He did seminal work on how we should think about famine not just as a problem of food production, but also in terms of entitlement failures and whether communities have the right to demand answers from authorities.
Be it the 2015 earthquake or the recent Rasuwa floods, bereaved families have demanded answers from the State about the way rescue and relief operations have been organised. There have also been questions about fairness and transparency in relief distribution. This is also about democracy and the responsiveness of State institutions, and whether they listen to these demands. ‘Teeth’ also means having the resources and ability to respond through concrete policy and programmatic interventions.
The idea of ‘voice’ and ‘teeth’, comes from scholar Jonathan Fox’s work. I have drawn on that idea, but also looked at it in the context of disaster. Jonathan Fox talks about how ‘voice’ and ‘teeth’ come together to operate as a ‘bite’. The ‘bite’, in this sense, is concrete measures that would protect the rights and welfare of disaster-affected communities.
What should a genuinely good, decentralised, community-led approach to disaster governance look like?
At the ward level, disaster management governance committees exist, but only on paper. We need human and financial resources to respond, as well as physical resources such as ambulances, hospitals and relief shelters. Emergency operations are not just about having resources; it is also about the general logic of governance. Disasters are better managed locally, as local governments have knowledge of the local context.
How do we ensure that human decisions do not make disasters even worse?
This comes back to who has the power to make decisions. The major casualties of the recent Nepal floods were hydropower and the road networks. Some estimates say that almost 10% of Nepal’s hydropower infrastructure was wiped out. Who granted licenses to construct hydropower projects in these areas? This is fundamentally a question of governance. Decisions about building critical infrastructure, such as schools and hospitals, on riverbanks are linked to human choices.
Do communities that are victims of infrastructural breakdowns have any say? What role did they have in the making of these infrastructures?
It is important to have a conversation about the climate crisis, but we also need to examine what happened downstream. What was the government’s role before the disaster? Did it do enough to protect the public? That is where a rights-based, more governance-centric approach to disasters comes in. It also involves a more social scientific approach to understanding disasters, rather than looking at them solely from the perspective of hazards and physical sciences.
How do we plan in such a way as to either avoid a disaster or rebuild after one?
There is no single cause of disaster. Some scholars have long called disasters as a wicked problem because they result from a combination of factors, such as natural hazards, risks and vulnerabilities. In the context of climate change, the recent floods in Nepal have made it painfully clear that this issue will become even more important. We need to be thinking about disasters from a multidimensional, interdisciplinary perspective. We have seen many disasters along the Nepal-India border that defy national boundaries.
We also need to take a transboundary approach.
How do we bring this conversation into policymaking? How do we decentralise disaster governance in a way that gives more power and resources to local bodies? We need accountability and responsibility. The government must listen to communities affected by disasters. Accountability and transparency matter.
Published – September 29, 2026 07:30 am IST
