Photovoice for Vulnerability: Resilience Building in the Philippines

Abstract

Disadvantaged residents are increasingly exposed to environmental hazards stemming from urbanization and climate change. More and more countries have raised top-down strategies to tackle climate hazards. But effective climate adaptation on the community level noticeably differs from the national level. Current frameworks for understanding resilience have not yet adequately explained the variations of vulnerability within the community and among individuals. Drawing on visual narratives, unstructured observations, and semi-structured interviews, this dissertation illustrates how the degrees, types, and impacts of vulnerability vary within and across households and communities; these less apparent variations for vulnerable subgroups call for different adaptive interventions. Integrating photovoice with social media not only reveals this missing perspective of vulnerability but also builds resilience by mobilizing social capital across different levels of governing actors. The combined application of photovoice and social media—a tool for research as well as intervention—investigates emergency entrepreneurship for enhancing resilience, which has been seldom mentioned by planning scholars. My study focuses on three informal settlement communities in metropolitan Manila and Cebu in the Philippines. In these communities, the processes of disaster preparation, response, adaptation, and rebuilding are embedded in routinized life cycles due to the frequency of hazards. Destructive flooding can happen monthly or even multiple times a week. Therefore, planning for disasters is often spontaneous—actions that require flexibility and innovation that continuously shape their adaptation to current and future disaster events. By revealing the disadvantaged perspectives of community resilience, my work suggests a need to readjust and refine the framework of vulnerability within the resilience literature. It also emphasizes how social capital as the capability and emergency entrepreneurship as the adaptive strategy can affect resilience building. In addition, this dissertation articulates how applying the photovoice method can contribute to digitalizing resiliency governance through the use of social media. This approach facilitates alternative and inclusive forms of data-generation and policymaking, while building trust in local communities. My findings are relevant for planning and climate change adaptation toward strengthening disadvantaged communities’ capacities for resilience building.