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Matching goods and people: aid andhuman security after the 2004 tsunami
Jin Sato
Published online: 11 Jan 2010.

To cite this article: Jin Sato (2010) Matching goods and people: aid and human security after the2004 tsunami, Development in Practice, 20:1, 70-84, DOI: 10.1080/09614520903436943
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09614520903436943

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Development in Practice, Volume 20, Number 1, February 2010

Matching goods and people: aid andhuman security after the 2004 tsunami

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Jin Sato
This article asks why, despite an abundance of aid materials and the good intentions of various
relief agencies, tsunami-relief efforts in Thailand after the Great Sumatra Earthquake of 2004
resulted in complaints and skewed aid distribution. Beginning with an analysis of how relief
goods are distributed in practice, the focus of the article shifts to forces that cause certain
types of goods to be concentrated in certain communities. It concludes by identifying thelimits of the goods-based relief approach, introducing intangible resources and identity as
more foundational dimensions in the study of distribution.
Les bons produits aux bonnes personnes: aide et sécurité humaine après le tsunami de 2004
L’auteur de cet article pose la question de savoir pourquoi, malgré l’abondance de matériel
d’aide et les bonnes intentions de diverses agences d’aide, les efforts humanitaires menésaprès le tsunami survenu en Thaı̈lande suite au grand séisme de Sumatra en 2004 ont donnélieu à des plaintes et à une distribution déformée de l’aide. Cet article commence par une
analyse de la manière dont les produits d’aide sont distribués dans la pratique, puis il seconcentre sur les forces qui font que certains types de produits sont concentrés dans certaines
communautés. Il conclut en mettant en évidence les limites de l’approche d’aide centrée surles produits et en introduisant les ressources intangibles et l’identité comme des dimensions
plus fondationnelles dans l’étude de la distribution.
Combinando mercadorias e pessoas: ajuda e segurança humana após o Tsunami de 2004
Este artigo pergunta por que, apesar da abundância de materiais de ajuda e das boas intençõesde várias agências de alı́vio humanitário, os esforços de alı́vio do tsunami na Tailândia após oGrande Terremoto de Sumatra de 2004 resultaram em reclamações e distribuição de ajuda desviada. Iniciando com uma análise de como os produtos de alı́vio humanitário são distribuı́dosna prática, o enfoque do artigo muda para as forças que fazem com que certos tipos de produtosfiquem concentrados em certas comunidades. Ele conclui identificando os limites da abordagem
de alı́vio humanitário baseada em produtos, introduzindo recursos intangı́veis e identidadecomo dimensões mais fundacionais no estudo de distribuição.
El equilibrio entre bienes y necesidades de la población: ayuda humanitaria y seguridad
humana tras el tsunami de 2004
Este ensayo cuestiona por qué la ayuda humanitaria que recibió Tailandia tras el Gran
Terremoto en Sumatra en 2004 se distribuyó mal y ocasionó quejas a pesar de la gran cantidad
de bienes materiales entregados y las buenas intenciones de las agencias humanitarias. Tras
70

ISSN 0961-4524 Print/ISSN 1364-9213 Online 010070-15 # 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/09614520903436943 Routledge PublishingMatching goods and people after the 2004 tsunami

analizar la distribución de la ayuda humanitaria en la práctica, el ensayo examina por quéciertos bienes se concentraron en sólo algunas comunidades. Concluye identificando loslı́mites del método de ayuda basado en bienes, postulando a la vez que los recursos intangibles
y la identidad son dimensiones más importantes a la hora de analizar la distribución.

KEY WORDS : Aid; Conflict and reconstruction; East Asia

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Introduction
The Indian Ocean tsunami caused by the Great Sumatra Earthquake on 26 December 2004 was
the most devastating natural disaster in recent history, resulting in a reported death toll of morethan 227,000 people and the displacement of 1.7 million more (Scheper 2006: 33). This tragic
incident triggered yet another giant wave, in the form of unprecedented aid from all over theworld. According to the Tsunami Evaluation Coalition (TEC), international aid amounted to
US$ 13.5 billion, averaging US$ 7100 per affected person (Bangkok Post 2006) – far
beyond what the average Thai fisher earns in one year.1 This articles focuses on the ‘Second
Tsunami’ of aid that this tragic event generated in Thailand. I ask why, despite an unparalleledabundance of material supplies, relief operations ended up causing much dissatisfaction at thereceiving end; and I discuss key distributive policies that must be implemented to avoid such
pitfalls in the future.
Numerous studies have analysed tsunami-related relief efforts, most of them from purely
physical and engineering perspectives, exploring issues such as how to rebuild infrastructure,
secure escape routes, develop effective early-warning systems, and train disaster professionals
in order to reduce future risks. Little consideration, however, has been given to the social infrastructure required for these programmes to function, as well as to the political repercussions ofaid projects on affected areas. From the perspective of disaster victims, the primary risk is notnecessarily the next disaster, but rather the political and economic turmoil caused by relief
efforts from the present one.
The social ramifications of relief efforts have gone largely unheeded for several reasons:(1) most disaster-management ‘experts’ have engineering backgrounds, and very few social
scientists and area specialists are typically brought in; (2) effective analysis of the social
dimensions of aid requires a substantial amount of time for research to capture visible effects;by the time changes can be observed, public attention to the issue has faded away, with a corresponding decrease in the quantity of research; and (3) many organisations involved in aid
operations are poorly co-ordinated with one another, making it difficult to obtain general
lessons that can be applied to future aid programmes. Instead of examining the long-term
effects of aid directly, I begin by interrogating the social prerequisites of aid programmes, theeffects of goods and services provided as ‘aid’, and the actual distributional mechanisms ofrelief efforts in the short term. Focusing on goods and mechanisms commonly observed inareas damaged by natural disasters minimises the difficulty of data collection and allows
comparisons of data from different areas and types of disasters. It may also yield typologies ofshort-term effects, based on the nature of assistance, which will help to minimise unexpecteddisadvantages of future relief policies.
Extensive global media coverage of the 2004 tsunami – owing in part to the large number ofWestern casualties in Thailand’s popular tourist destinations – attracted an historically unprecedented volume of goods and services to the affected regions. Furthermore, in Thailand heavy
damage was concentrated in specific locations and left surrounding infrastructure mostly intact,
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making aid operations relatively easy, compared with damaged areas in Aceh or in Sri Lanka.
Paradoxically, however, tsunami victims complained about the lack of cash and material
supplies that were supposed to come from the government and aid organisations. Why did
the 2004 relief efforts, despite ample funds and favourable conditions, so completely fail toprovide satisfactory aid to the tsunami victims?
A typical explanation of failed aid projects is based on the theory of ‘elite capture’, blaming
certain corrupt elites (often government officials) for disproportionately capturing benefits originally intended for victims. This article attempts to provide an alternative theory by focusing on
the nature of the goods delivered during relief efforts, and the distribution mechanisms
employed. Using this approach, it becomes possible to develop distributive schemes freefrom time-consuming information-collecting processes and problematic reliance on the goodintentions of relief agents.
Social mechanisms of distribution, particularly for disaster relief, often reveal aspects of communal life that seldom surface in the normal state.2 The connections between goods and people
in such situations have been of primary concern to social scientists, particularly economists. For
example, in Commodities and Capabilities, Amartya Sen begins by saying: ‘Much of economics is concerned with the relation between commodities and people. It investigates how
people arrange to make commodities, how they establish command over commodities, what
they do with commodities and what they get out of commodities’ (Sen 1985:1).
Undeniably, commodities play a critical role in our daily lives, and while social scientists
have paid much attention to how people gain command over certain types of goods and commodities, it is seldom asked how goods, in reverse, inform the domain of choices available tohuman users. A reversal of Sen’s formulation poses the question of how commodities arrange
and shape the people who use them. I found exploration of this question particularly worthwhilein analysing the 2004 tsunami response, when I encountered endless individual confusion andcommunal upset caused by a massive inflow of aid goods and the subsequent problem of how to
distribute them. Of course, the logic of the effect of aid commodities on human communities is
not exactly the reverse of Sen’s formulation, since goods do not exercise intentional control
over people; however, because the functionality of goods requires certain pre-existing
conditions on the part of the user, some people will inevitably be placed in more advantageous
positions than others. This dimension often escapes social and political analysis, since existing
resource arrangements, as we shall see, seldom attract attention as criteria for aid distribution.
The social meaning of material objects was effectively elucidated by Langdon Winner in his
controversial article ‘Do artifacts have politics?’ (Winner 1980). Winner took the case of
New York City bridges with extremely low overpasses, arguing that the architect Robert
Moses designed them intentionally low in order to achieve a particular social effect. Moses,
according to evidence cited by Winner, was a racist, and in order to make sure that Jones
Beach, his widely acclaimed public park, was inaccessible to blacks, he deliberately madethe overpasses too low for buses carrying mostly poor, black passengers to pass under them
(Winner 1980).3 Case-specific observation like this reminds us that it is worthwhile toexamine the political effects of things beyond their immediate function. There seems to be
an important yet unexplored dimension of material objects in which ‘goods distributethemselves among people’ (Waltzer 1983: 7).
In this article, I will refer specifically to Jon Elster’s Local Justice (Elster 1992). Elster
provides a useful basis for the analysis of interactions between the intentions of institutions
allocating specific goods to certain people and the actual distributional outcome. Elstersought to come up with common principles characterising a wide variety of in-kind distribution.
In Local Justice, he explores issues such as who gets a kidney for transplantation, who is chosen
for military service, who is admitted to competitive colleges, and who is selected for lay-offs
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(Elster 1992). Common to these questions is that they interrogate the distributive mechanism of
scarce goods that are provided neither by the government nor by the market. Elster’s frameworkprovides an excellent entry point; however, it does have some limitations, particularly whenapplied to developing countries where social norms and cultural identities play a large rolein distributive outcome. While the distribution of goods is important, this research finds that,at a foundational level, resources that generate and attract certain goods to certain people(while denying access to others) are more essential.
What follows is an attempt to extend and critique Elster’s ‘local justice’ theory, using thetsunami-relief efforts in Thailand as a case study. I carried out fieldwork 14– 19 January(four days), 23– 1 March 2005 (eight days), 27 March – 5 April 2006 (10 days), and 20– 25
March 2007 (five days). Focusing mainly on the principles and secondary effects of goods
distribution, I visited the worst-hit areas of Pang-nga (mainly Kao-lak), Tran, Krabi, andPhi-Phi Island.

Tsunami in Thailand
Magnitude of the disasterAt approximately 10:00 am on 26 December 2004, a huge wave caused by the Great Sumatra
Earthquake hit the southern shores of Thailand, wreaking damage of a magnitude unprecedented in recorded history. The devastation resulted in 5395 dead (of whom 2436 were
foreign nationals) and 2817 missing (896 of them foreign). An additional 8257 persons,
including 2392 foreigners, were seriously injured. See Table 1.
One social characteristic of the event was the diversity of casualties, particularly the foreign
tourists, as well as migrant workers from Burma (Myanmar) and Cambodia. An estimated
60,000 Burmese migrant workers were affected by the tsunami (Scheper 2006), and identification of these migrant workers was difficult, because most had entered the country illegallyand thus lacked proper registration. Many even refused to be housed in refugee camps andfled from emergency assistance to find refuge in nearby forests. The diversity of casualties,
from wealthy tourists to illegal migrants with a multitude of ethnicities, religions, legal andeconomic standings, and occupations, made relief efforts in Thailand particularly challenging.
Following the visit of then-Prime Minister Taksin on the day of the disaster, aid started
pouring into the area, sharply increasing day after day. Despite the Thai government’s
announcement that it would decline international financial assistance, the disaster attracted
huge amounts of money and aid goods from all over the world. The loss of more than 3000
foreign lives in Thailand amplified international attention to relief efforts, with increased commitments for recovery assistance from many different agencies. In addition to the diversity ofcasualties, this diversity of aid agencies assisting under severe time constraints made the relief
task even more demanding.
Public interest and willingness to contribute were unprecedented. More than 10,000 people
queued in front of the Red Cross Headquarters in Bangkok to volunteer or donate blood. The
rapid surge in volunteers and donated goods from all across the country left little time for
Red Cross staff to engage in more direct assistance to the victims. Donations collected at thePrime Minister’s Office amounted to 1.6 billion baht (US$ 4 billion) as of May 2005, but
only one billion (US$ 2.5 billion) was actually disbursed.
Despite the vast sums of money collected at the centre, voices of the victims rang out largely
in disappointment. On 2 February 2005, The Nation, a major English-language newspaper
published in Thailand, printed a special issue entitled ‘We Have Received Nothing: Voicesof the Tsunami Victims’, highlighting the bureaucratic delays and maldistribution of aid.
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Table 1:

Impacts of the tsunami on humans, housing, environment, and livelihoods in Thailand

Dimension of impact
Human

Housing units

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Natural resources

Water sources

Livelihoods

Sub-dimension

Degree of damage/impact

Dead

5395

Injured

8457

Missing2817

Children without one or both parents

1449

Destroyed

3302

Damaged

1504

Coral

Minimal damage 32,013 rais;
Substantial damage 3812 raisBeach1485 rais

Beach forest

90,093 rais

Waste/disposal waste

2 sites

Saline soil area

about 3957.5 rais

Surface-water ponds

102

Shallow wells

2324

Ground-water ponds or wells

737

Fisheries

US$ 44,044,117

Livestock

US$ 429,158

Agriculture

US$ 161,314

Business enterprises

US$ 308,205,908

Tourism

Around US$ 15 million loss

Note: 1 rai ¼ 6.25 hectare.
Source: Segschneider and Worakul (2007), pp. 6–7

Criticisms were targeted mainly at gaps in criteria and duplicated procedures among aid
agencies, slow processing time, arbitrary allocation of goods, and rumours of corruption.4
Frequent news reports emerged on suspected embezzlement of funds collected for thevictims and their families (The Nation 2007).
‘Elite capture’ thesis
When there are enough goods to go around and few are actually being disbursed, the popular
explanation relies on some variant of the ‘elite capture’ theory (Platteau 2004), in which‘elite’ implies government officials and village leaders who have disproportionate access tosocial, political, and economic power.5 The term ‘elite capture’ refers to the process bywhich these privileged individuals dominate and corrupt community-level planning and governance (Dasgupta and Beard 2007). Examples range from outright embezzlement of aid money by
government officials to more skilful manipulation of aid flow by local leaders and other influential people. I wish to expand the definition of the term in the aid context to include captures ofexternally provided goods and resources initially intended for the needy that are subsequently
exploited by those in more advantageous positions (including local aid staff), resulting in a
skewed distribution of aid (Platteau 2004). The tendency of aid to be unevenly distributed
can grow stronger in disaster-relief situations, since extreme time limitation inevitably increases
outsiders’ reliance on local leaders for ‘representative’ judgment.
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The fact that large sums of windfall money tend to invite both intended and unintended elite
capture has often been cited in the development literature as a primary obstacle to poverty
alleviation.6 This in turn leads to either a deplorable lack of political will and advocacy forcommunity-driven development or strategic discussion of targeting the poor by devising
ways to minimise elite influences (van de Wall 1998).
Because elite-capture theory often succeeds in providing convincing explanations, particularly to the general public, other factors that may explain skewed distribution often go unnoticed. Narrow identification of so-called ‘antagonists’ tends to deflect our attention fromother, perhaps more remediable, causes of distributional bias.7 Also, reliance on explanations
based solely on actors’ intentions under-estimates the effects of structural factors that may
have relevant yet unintended effects on aid distribution.
Having visited sites of aid operation two weeks after the 2004 tsunami, I believe that most aid
agents did their best to serve the needs of the victims – surrounded by such unprecedented devastation, anyone would feel an immense sense of obligation to do something. Attending various
co-ordination meetings and conducting interviews with aid workers at the front line left one in
no doubt that they were committed and serious about their cause. Perhaps, then, the limitation
lies in the fact that they made their best effort from their own perspective. After interviewing
more than 20 individuals from international and national front-line aid organisations, I
noticed that the primary concerns of the assisting agencies were, first, how much aid wasgoing to what location; and second, what (and how much) other agencies were sending. The
first question focused on distribution between communities while neglecting distribution
within communities, and the second, which came much later in the rehabilitation process,failed to ask what aid people had actually received and how they received it. Failure toaddress these issues is part of the reason for the victims’ overwhelming complaints.
From the perspective of aid officials, there are justifiable reasons for these lapses andpriorities: when time is limited, relief efforts must rely on local leaders to take care of community-level allocation of goods. Also, aid agencies often fiercely compete with one another forvisible results and the resulting increase in international reputation gained by effectively administering aid. Reputation and record are essential, particularly for NGOs relying on donations.
In examining how aid goods are matched to recipients, it is necessary to examine the principle of distribution that each aid agency implicitly or explicitly adopts in allocating goods.
Elster’s ‘Local Justice’ framework
Are there certain categories of goods (and burdens) that are always allocated under specificprinciples? Or, alternatively, to what extent is the allocation of goods specific to particularcountries or cultures? These are questions posed by Jon Elster in his book Local Justice(Elster 1992). Elster focuses on kidney transplantation, college admissions, military service,
and immigration – for none of which has either economics or political science attempted todevelop a conceptual framework explaining how institutions should allocate goods and burdens.
‘Local’ refers to the fact that different institutional sectors use different substantive principles(such as need, merit, seniority) of allocation (Elster 1992: 3). Furthermore, in local justice,success in one arena does not depend on bad luck in another: there will usually be no special
privilege for entering a competitive college, for example, just because an applicant has beendenied a kidney transplant. Also, ‘justice’ is used not in the normative sense, but as an
explanatory concept to mean allocation of scarce goods for the purpose of maximising someaggregate features of the recipients, or more generally, of all citizens (Elster 1992: 6).
Further contrast with ‘global’ justice may clarify Elster’s argument. Globally redistributive
policies, according to Elster, are characterised by three features: (1) they are designed centrally
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at the level of national government; (2) they are intended to compensate people suffering fromvarious sorts of bad luck resulting from the possession of ‘morally arbitrary properties’; and (3)they typically take the form of cash transfers (Elster 1992: 4). The contrast between the two
notions of justice is summarised in Table 2.
The power of Elster’s approach lies not only in his description of non-market and nongovernment allocation schemes that have immediate distributive impacts of their own, butalso in his account of secondary effects. Secondary effects occur when members of group X
are disproportionate to members of group Y, and thus certain goods and burdens immediately
allocated to Y end up concentrating in X. Providing fishing gear to communities, for example,
may end up benefiting men more than women (particularly widows), although that is not theintention of those who provide aid. Similarly, donations of houses to Thai nationals – ignoringminorities and migrant labourers who have lost their homes but are not legal residents –wrongly assume that the benefits can be evenly distributed.
Elster’s focus on the principles of distribution depending on the nature of goods offers important insight into making aid more effective. Goods delivered as aid often have influence reaching beyond their immediate objective. Providing water in the form of communal tanks, forexample, may have a different effect from distributing bottled water, as the former requires
some form of collective management, and the latter may cause garbage problems. Likewise,provision of fishing tools may have little value for those who do not fish, and creation of avillage revolving fund may present difficulties in a community with limited experience of
successful collective actions. The value of goods, therefore, depends not only on the physicalcharacteristics of the goods themselves, but also on the human and social elements of thecommunities who derive benefits from them.

Nature of goods
A clear understanding of the nature of goods to be allocated is necessary before any goods canbe fairly distributed. The usefulness of examining the nature of goods is derived not from thephysical attributes of the goods themselves, but rather from the incentives and social orderthat the goods render in human communities. In this respect, discretion becomes an importantfactor; allocations based on gender or age are more straightforward than allocations based onneed, which is hard to verify and thus invites manipulation of entitlements. These conditions
often play a critical role in triggering moral hazard and secondary effects that work against
the poorer sections of target communities. The distribution of goods based on need, forexample, is often exposed to potential recipients’ incentive to exaggerate their needs (i.e.
moral hazard), while allocation based on gender or physical disability reduces such occurrences. Specification of the exact effects of a particular choice of criteria and methods maylead us to develop concrete ideas for effective assistance (or less disruptive assistance) in situations where collection of detailed information is costly.

Table 2:

Local and global justice
Global justiceLocal justiceDecision making

Highly centralised

Decentralised

Subject of distribution

Cash

In-kind goods and services

Objective of distribution

Compensation

Not compensation

Source: Author, based on Elster (1992)

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Table 3 describes typical examples of goods and services provided to regions hit by the 2004
tsunami and temporary refugee camps. Life-support goods – food, water and housing – comefirst. The second stage is often related to the betterment of the lives of those in refugee camps,
where most people end up staying much longer than they originally expected. Finally, from thethird stage on, a gradual return to original habitats begins, with parallel efforts to build permanent houses. Legal problems arise in areas where people have no land titles.
In classifying types of goods, several important criteria must be taken into consideration(Elster 1992). The first is whether or not the goods are divisible: goods are indivisible if
more than one person cannot simultaneously receive them. Division of indivisible goods(such as labour) destroys their value. Communal electricity generators and water tanks areexamples of indivisible goods that must be used collectively. This is an important consideration,
since if goods cannot be equally divided, some arrangement must be worked out so that thebalance between the benefits of the goods and the burden of maintaining them is perceived
as ‘fair’ in a given community.8
The second criterion is homogeneity, meaning that all individual units of any one commodity
are indistinguishable with respect to features that make the commodity desirable. An earlywarning system, for example, may be equally beneficial for all of those who live within
hearing distance from the equipment. Temporary houses derived from the same building
material, on the other hand, may have various advantages and disadvantages, depending on amultitude of other factors (such as access to toilets and water).
The third criterion is scarcity: goods are scarce when there is not enough to satisfy all
individuals at a particular time. In tsunami-struck Thailand, donated goods such as canned
food, medicine, and used clothes were often in over-supply. Scarcity becomes relevant for
determining qualitative differences between goods and the timeline of their supply. Temporary
housing, for example, may be considered non-scarce when there are more houses than individuals who need shelter; however, even if the total number of houses is enough, the timing ofhouse-building services often creates a sense of scarcity, since houses cannot be built all at
once. The question of who should have priority in moving into these houses then becomes
an issue.
Notice that variation in the quality of aid goods creates incentives and necessitates certainsocial arrangements for those who wish to obtain benefits (or avoid burdens) derived fromthe goods. Communal water tanks, for example, require a system of collective maintenance
Table 3:

Sequence of goods provided to tsunami victims

First stage (two weeks after Second stage (one month after
tsunami)tsunami)Food and water

Temporary housing

Third stage (two months after
tsunami and on)
Permanent housing

Medicine

Employment opportunities

Early-warning system

Tents

Day-care centers

Constructing evacuation routes

Clothes and blankets

Water tanks

Legal support

Cooking utensils

General volunteer activities

Temporary toilets

Establishing boat factories

Electricity generators

Providing fishing gear

Health clinics
Clean-up volunteers
Source: Author’s survey

Development in Practice, Volume 20, Number 1, February 201077

Jin Satoin order to produce benefits for the community. Using differences in operational requirements,
then, provides a practical way to determine the type and distribution pattern of aid goods (withsimilar function) in order to effectively reach the most needy.

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Mechanisms of distribution
Before they can reach the hands of the consumer, goods must be distributed through some sortof mechanism; the particular choice of allocation method, however, often entails secondary
distributional impacts that are hard to detect. Table 4 presents a description of typical goods
and services provided, along with their respective distribution methods, together withthe guiding norm at the foundation of each distribution mechanism. Lottery appears to be themost common distribution method (allocating everything from small daily goods to more
expensive items such as temporary houses). Such extensive use of the lottery system illustrates
how notions of fairness based on simple equality are preferred in the distribution of many typesof goods. A particularly important aspect of the distribution of goods is the secondary effect (orafter-shock) that the allocation inflicts on human communities. Dependency on external aid,
village-level conflict over unfair distribution policies, shortage of aid allocated to minorities(such as sea gypsies), mistrust of donor agencies, and corruption of local leaders are among
the problems that have surfaced during and after relief efforts.
The major reason for victims’ dissatisfaction with aid was not necessarily a shortage ofgoods, but rather the unfair ways in which those goods were distributed. Dissatisfaction stemming from flawed aid distribution is hard to mend, because of its structural nature; most donors
see aid as ‘one shot’ medicine to heal devastated communities, while the receiving end sees
each relief project as one in a series of many, coming from various sectors of society. In
other words, receivers accumulate experience after experience during each successive roundof aid, influencing the way in which they practise distribution in the next round. To illustrate,
in one Islamic community that I visited, village members literally counted the aid goods theyreceived to see if there was enough to go around the village; if there was not enough, theyrejected the donations altogether. This principle was born out of past conflict triggeredby the problematic division of scarce goods.
The role of the government in aid distribution warrants particular attention. In Elster’s classification, the government is a central distributing agency that plays a key role in compensation.
Indeed, the Thai government did function as a compensatory institution after the 2004 tsunami;
however, the involvement of many different government subdivisions in aid activities complicated relief efforts. The Ministry of Interior, for example, had criteria for compensating loss of
subsistence that differed from the criteria employed by the Fishery Department. With more than
10 agencies involved, all with subsidiary local administrative bodies (i.e. provincial anddistrict), each agency acted within its own arena of local justice, rather than from a bird’s-eyeview of global justice.
Although the model observing characteristics of goods and their distribution mechanisms
may explain some important aspects of distributional biases in aid allocation, it is far from complete: it does not, for instance, provide hints to explain why some communities attract moregoods than others, despite similar levels of damage.9 Well-publicised refugee camps such as
Baan Nam Khem garnered high-profile media coverage and attracted abundant assistancefrom all sectors, particularly NGOs, while areas far from tourist spots attracted less plentiful,slower assistance. The spatial gap in aid allocation suggests that, in order to maintain the fairness of material welfare provided by relief efforts, aid agencies must take into account factors
outside the domain of goods.
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Matching goods and people after the 2004 tsunami
Table 4:

Norms, distribution methods, and secondary effects of aid

Norm

Commondistribution methods

Examples of goods
and services

Problematic secondary effects andcausesLottery

Permanent housing
Temporary housing
Emergency basket† Opportunity to participate in thelottery (e.g. information andeligibility) is sometimes
manipulated

Food and water† Aid dependency, maldistribution† Waiting may eliminate possibility ofother opportunities

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Queue

Needs
satisfaction

Equal division

Cash
Donated goods (whenenough for all
members)† Rejection of goods that cannot be
equally shared† Division of goods based onhousehold unit without considering
the number of household members

Waiting list

Donated goods ingeneral† Possible manipulation of the list
(who decides who should be
included, and at what position?)

Needs assessment byoutsiders

Living space andhabitat
Electricity generators
Medical appliances
Volunteer labour† Imposition of national standards for‘safety’ reasons† Spill-over of benefits to non-victims† Disregard of maintenance ability† Aid dependency

Needs assessment byinsiders† Dependence on pre-existing power/
Fishing boat, fishingreliance on local leaders’ judgementgear† Lack of support to those who do not
Temporary housingfish
Communal water tanks

Voluntary reception

Employment
opportunities
Occupational training
Day-care centres† Impartial dissemination of aid
information† Excludes unregistered individuals

Entitlements† Spill-over to those who were
Residential areas
Allocation toregistered in affected area withouthousehold (eligibility Donations from
actually being resident
religious organisations
assessment)† Incentives to change eligibility
Cash compensation
requirements (e.g. some villagers
from government
adopted Christianity in order toFishing boats
receive goods)† Duplication and confusion in theconfirmation of eligibility

None

Direct and random
handouts

Cash
General goods
Tents† Double counting† Intra-community feelings of
unfairness† Reduced incentive to work

Source: Author’s survey

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Jin Sato

To gain and to defend: extending Elster’s framework to aid policy
The case of the 2004 tsunami highlights the limitation of Elster’s approach, as well as possibilities for further enrichment of goods-allocation theory. Apart from the obvious exclusion of
non-Western cases from his discussion of local justice, Elster’s examples have three primary
limitations when applied to the 2004 tsunami situation:

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1. In the aftermath of the tsunami, multiple types of goods, as well as cash, were provided to
victims at the same time, often generating interactions between various types of goods
received.
2. Distributions were made both from the perspective of compensation for loss as well as inaccordance with a simple local-justice principle.
3. Time limitation was so severe that little allowance was made for the collection of detailed
recipient information.
Elster developed his argument by framing individuals as the primary actors in receiving goods
and burdens, where giver and taker are paired one-to-one. After the 2004 tsunami, however, theprimary recipients of emergency goods were communities or groups of people, especially after
one or two weeks of immediate assistance. The distribution of aid goods, then, was the task ofcommunities, not individuals. Selection of the community as the basic unit of allocation stems
primarily from the practical need to depend on local leaders for intra-community distribution.
Problems in matching goods to needy communities tend to arise in the gap between intercommunity allocation of goods and services and subsequent distribution among community
members.
In Thailand, I observed that outsiders provided more goods to communities possessing
certain resources than to other communities with similar levels of damage. Communities
close to main roads with outspoken leaders, good connections with NGOs, and histories ofcollective action often attracted more external assistance. In other words, resource endowments
rather than needs seem to have a distinct effect on the level of aid granted to any given
community. Here, ‘resource endowment’ refers to bundles of potential services that are composed not only of material resources but also of human resources such as knowledge, power,
and social capital. Resource is a relational rather than a substantive concept (Bathelt andGlüchler 2006).
Because identification of the function of particular resources takes time, resource endowment
is a critical dimension of distribution. Outsiders are often concerned about goods – which are
typically tangible, movable objects – and how to distribute them. In contrast, resources areoften difficult or sometimes impossible to move (if a resource is completely immovable,
there is no distributional problem – just an unsolvable situation in which some people haveless access to a resource than others). One shortcoming of aid-distribution perspectives thatare preoccupied with commodities is that people’s well-being relies not only on movable
goods that they seek and gain, but also on continued access to resources that consumers
already possess. Unlike commodity goods whose quantity decreases with consumption,
resources that people possess often increase through their utilisation: the value of land, forexample, increases not when it is left unused but when new ideas and technologies are introduced to develop and make use of it. To secure a livelihood, particularly when externally threatened, people seek to defend and retain resources, rather than simply trying to obtain new goods
and benefits from outside.
As noted earlier, resources lie at the foundation of goods distribution. At an even more foundational level lies the dimension of ‘identity security’, referring to a generic sense of belonging
to a particular culture based on language, subsistence, religion, and shared history. In fact, the80Development in Practice, Volume 20, Number 1, February 2010

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Matching goods and people after the 2004 tsunami

first challenge of tsunami recovery was to identify the bodies of the dead and assign them totheir respective communities. Identity conflicts are clear in the case of the Moken (seagypsies), who have a long history of residence in Thailand yet have rarely had official citizenship status. Figure 1 depicts the relationships between identity and the other dimensions ofhuman security (resources and goods).
The case of Baan Nahm Khem illustrates how goods and resources (social capital in this case)interact with one another ((1) in Figure 1). In this community, from the very early stage ofrecovery assistance, various types of self-help group were formed, and a village revolving
fund, with assistance from outsiders, supported village activities in an effort to return tonormal life. According to my interview with village leaders, distribution norms based on fairness were established when the community intensively discussed, during the early stages ofrecovery, who should move into the temporary houses first. Unlike many villages which
decided housing allocation by lottery, people in Nahm Khem developed their own priority
criteria, based on age, severity of injury, and presence of small children in families eligiblefor housing. It is admirable that Nahm Khem community members devised their own criteria
for allocation, but even more impressive that they made all information about aid goods
public knowledge, posting and regularly updating a list of donated items on a communal
board where everyone could see it.
What conditions, then, enabled Nahm Khem to undertake this kind of initiative? Most of
those in the village at the time of the disaster were originally from the same village, Nahm
Khem, which may have strengthened their social capital. The involvement of various NGOs,
in material terms as well as in terms of strategy to rebuild the community, must have also
contributed to the village’s success. Interestingly, Nahm Khem’s village headman had a bad
reputation for privately benefiting from tsunami assistance. In a sense, then, the typical elitecapture situation was already common knowledge among the villagers. The leader who took
the initiative in publicising donation information and developing connections with outside
NGOs was an active committee member of the Tambon sub-district council. Substantial structural pressure for this second leader to gain recognition among the villagers and perform wellprobably stemmed from the village leader’s bad reputation; this multiple-leader condition,although it grew originally out of coincidence, later acted as a check to prevent one-sided
dominance. A sense of fairness influenced people’s incentive to co-operate with their fellow

Figure 1:

Anatomy of human security

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Jin Satovillagers – a factor that, in the long run, proved to be more critical than the amount of aid
received by the village.
The case of Patong Beach, meanwhile, illustrates the connection between resources and identity ((2) in Figure 1). Close to Patong Beach, on Puket Island, was a small Moken village.
Despite living on state-owned land with no legal title whatsoever, the Moken people had
engaged in fishing to support the tourism industry on Patong Beach. As a result, there had
been tension for some time between state agencies and businesses wishing to expand resort
facilities and Moken villagers illegally residing in desirable resort areas. When the tsunami
hit and Moken villagers on Puket Island lost their homes, the city government refused togive permission to rebuild destroyed communities in the same location. Displaced villagers
were, however, ultimately allowed to stay on Puket Island, with new houses donated by a
private company after an outpouring of enthusiastic media support and sympathetic public
opinion. In this case, mass media and the attitudes of the public at large played critical roles
in connecting resources (in this case, land) with people’s ethnic identity to strike a balancein relief efforts.
An example of goods having a direct impact on identity ((3) in Figure 1) can be found in otherMoken villages – Thungwa and Thabtawan, for instance, where Christian organisations wereactive in aid activities. Having lived in the area for centuries as sea nomads, constantly
moving from one place to another, the Moken people lack the ability to own land, and lackalso a distinct sense of nationality. Some adhere to Buddhist teachings, while other communities
follow Islamic traditions. In the year following the 2004 tsunami, however, churches began toappear in Moken villages. In Taptawan village, which I visited in March 2005, a villager commented that the number of Christians in the village had increased five times since the tsunami,
making it clear that the aid activities of Christian organisations have significantly contributed toaffected people’s shifting sense of belonging (Sithiprasertkula 2007).10
The argument here is not that resources and dimensions of identity should always be taken
into consideration during aid operations. Rather, the point is that the inputs of goods as aid
often have foundational impacts on the resources and identity of people in disaster-affectedareas, and these consequences must be taken into account in order to accurately evaluate thesuccess or failure of relief efforts. In fact, expanding the focus of aid evaluation raises thedifficult issue of an affected area’s political history of property arrangement. Land-ownershipdisputes are one of the central issues unexpectedly made salient by the 2004 tsunami(Scheper 2006). Yet, once relief efforts reach the stage of rebuilding lives through building
permanent housing and securing employment, aid agencies must address the entrenchedinequalities in resource distribution that had existed before the tsunami, in addition to thequestion of how relief efforts will affect the existing power structure.
What implications, then, does this study have for disaster-aid policy? First, it is clear that
selection of goods and distribution mechanisms is instrumentally important in satisfying theneeds of some people, while neglecting those of the others, primarily due to secondary
effects occurring within communities. In other words, if we take these effects into considerationin advance, we may be able to speed up the relief process, with the explicit intention of reaching
the poorest. Second, aid efforts should focus not only on supplying goods and services but also
on strengthening institutional resources that allow recipient communities to more effectively
attract and digest those goods and services based on local criteria of fairness. Third, after the
emergency stage, outside relief agencies should co-ordinate with one another to develop
ways to reduce pre-existing inequalities or dominance, instead of simply increasing theamount of allocated aid. In situations complicated by entrenched inequalities in basic resources,
engines of public opinion such as mass media often have the power to galvanise positivechange, a power that local poor and disaster victims alone seldom possess.
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Matching goods and people after the 2004 tsunami

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Conclusion
This article began by invoking Elster’s ‘local justice’ framework to derive ideas applicable tothe context of emergency assistance and human security. The particular challenge of disaster aid
in southern Thailand, it seems, was the inescapable dilemma of reconciling present needs withthe problems of legitimacy inherited from the past: new houses have to be built on land with its
own complicated history of ownership politics; compensation can be given only to people withproper registration. In other words, relief efforts were shaped by the history of the area as muchas by actual relief infrastructure.
I argue for the need to look beyond the role of emergency goods and into the background ofresources and identities that guide aid efforts in certain directions; victims are not merely
subjects of aid, but active agents with the power to solve their own problems. The domain ofresources attracting goods to certain communities, while rejecting others, should be of particular interest to aid communities. Because the secondary effects of relief efforts on resources andhuman identities endure for generations, we must pay careful attention to the voices of victims
in order to understand what people affected by disasters wish to defend, rather than blindly
providing what we think they wish to obtain.

Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this article was presented at the Policy Sciences Annual Institute 2007 at Claremont
McKenna College, Claremont, CA, USA, 25–27 October 2007. I would like to thank Matt Auer and Bill
Ascher for their comments and support. Anonymous referees provided useful comments. I would also liketo express my sincere appreciation to Ms Ravadi Prasertcharoensuk of the Sustainable Development
Foundation for arranging the field surveys.

Notes
1. The same article refers to the striking contrast of the 2004 Flooding Catastrophe in Bangladesh, whichdrew just US$ 3 per affected person.
2. ‘Mechanism’ refers to an ‘identifiable causal pattern that comes into play under certain, generally
unknown conditions’ (Elster 1992:16).
3. Winner concludes his argument by saying: ‘Many technical devices and systems important in everyday life contain possibilities for many different ways of ordering human activity. Consciously or not,deliberately or inadvertently, societies choose structures for technologies that influence how people
are going to work, communicate, travel, consume and so forth over a very long time’ (Winner
1980: 127).
4. Suspicion came not only from the villagers but also from the international donors. The US government
also tried to push the Thai police to investigate the suspected misuse of 88 million baht (about US$ 3.5
million) in donations intended to help the Thai Tsunami Disaster Victim Identification (The Nation
2007).
5. Other possible explanations include pure ignorance and lack of knowledge about the target population.
These explanations seldom play major roles in the official discourse of aid, since to admit this possibility will discredit donor activities, and media will have more incentive to report more ‘interesting’news involving sabotage and corruption.
6. Unintended elite capture refers to structural and systematic biases that put elites in more advantageous
positions in terms of access to aid and development opportunities.
7. Policy recommendations based on the assumption of elite misbehaviour highlight either changing theattitudes of elites through education or reforming incentive structure, or empowering the poor toenhance their voices. Either path requires long-term commitment.

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Jin Sato
8. Tendler (1982) claims that divisible and scarce goods are hard to distribute to the poor, since they tend
to invite elite capture.
9. Jeff Sachs eloquently delivered this point in his Time Magazine article ‘Class system of catastrophe’(Sachs 2005).
10. It should be noted here that not all Christian organisations encouraged religious commitment inexchange for aid goods.

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The author
Jin Sato is an Associate Professor in the Institute of Oriental Culture at the University of Tokyo and also
serves as a visiting fellow at the JICA Research Institute. He was a policy adviser to the Ministry of Natural
Resources and Environment of Thailand from October 2004 to September 2005. The views expressed inthis article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the organisations to which
he is affiliated. ,hwaka@rr.iij4u.or.jp.

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