Why community strength and public investment need to go hand in hand
Alishba Awan
Whenever disasters like floods, earthquakes or heatwaves strike Pakistan, one thing remains constant. People come together for each other; neighbours open their home, even sacred places like mosques are converted to overnight shelters. Meanwhile local volunteers prepare relief in advance of formal relief teams. This culture of “collective care” has saved numerous lives and is the first action that is taken by any family into crisis. It is one of the most noble aspects of how Pakistani society deals with hardship, and is due to be recognised as such. Yet no amount of neighbourly goodwill can bridge a $16 billion reconstruction gap, an underlying truth demonstrated in UN and World Bank estimates after the 2022 floods, which caused over $30 billion in loss and damage.
In recent years this community service has grown to be coupled with more formal tools like early warning systems, disaster preparedness training and mobile alert apps, all grouped together as resilience. These tools are valuable. In Japan, the warning system for earthquakes gives precious seconds to people to get under cover before the tremor strikes, and has undoubtedly saved lives. The problem is not in community solidarity or awareness, the more interesting question is what happens when they end up doing more work than they were ever meant to.
Here is the more subtle dynamic that is worth paying attention to. Communities can handle most crises without outside assistance, if they have the support of neighbors and access to basic training, but this self-reliance can unintentionally have a negative effect. Governments may delay investing in critical long-term measures including reinforced embankments, improved drainage systems or safer housing that really prevent disaster. At the same time, those who have informal support will be less inclined to demand things they are legally entitled to, like spending on public infrastructure or housing rights, just because they have other forms of support.
This is not a story of the Government vs the people, it’s closer to two well meaning habits which quietly reinforce each other. Communities take pride in managing hardship together, which causes the governments to feel less urgency to fund the harder, slower work of infrastructure. Neither side is acting in bad faith, but the result is the same, gaps that are expected to be closed by public investment stay open a little longer, patched over each time with the same neighbourly effort.
The word resilience itself has an interesting history. It was introduced in international development literature in the early 2000s, to refer to absorption and recovery capacities of a community which was, and still is a useful concept. However policy documents over time changed the meaning of the word. Today it’s often described as a community’s ability to cope on its own, separated from the physical infrastructure it was originally meant to accompany.
Resilience gets measured in its own way. The number of households contacted by an early warning message, or the number of individuals to a preparedness workshop is often reported. These matter, awareness saves lives. However as with any infrastructure project, like widening a drainage channel or strengthening an embankment, construction work is reported separately, typically in a different department, a different budget line. The two are seldom seen together in the policy discussion. So a community can be called more resilient, while no one actually checks whether the drainage upgrade it was counting on ever happened.
None of this is to say that community solidarity or preparedness training should be discouraged in Pakistan. It means not replacing public investment with it, but complementing it. Reports and budgets can be used to track both these strategies, so that a rise in community preparedness is never mistaken for a falling need for infrastructure spending. At the same time, the citizens while continuing to look out for each other can also hold onto the fact that protections such as working drains, safe housing, sound embankments are not just borrowed favours from a kind neighbour, but public entitlements.
Pakistan’s culture of communities standing up for each other isn’t the issue. It’s one of the country’s authentic assets, and has sustained people during some of the worst crises in recent history. But this strength if unchecked will slowly and silently cause both sides to lose sight of what remains to be accomplished. Real resilience should mean neighbours who have each other’s back, standing on ground that a functioning state has actually built beneath them.
