ASEAN Regional Forum...

From Latin America

The earthquake and landslides that affected the Paez region in Colombia on 6 June 1994 were among the worst disasters of the 1990s. Although Gustavo Wilches-Chaux presents En El Borde Del Caos as an attempt to systematically capture his experience of working on the rehabilitation program undertaken by the NASA KIWE ("People's Land" in the indigenous language) corporation after the Paez disaster, the book takes on a much larger dimension than just a report on the reconstruction program. Gustavo extensively uses System Dynamics and Chaos theory to explore linkages between disasters and development processes. In Systems parlance, Gustavo defines vulnerability as the incapacity of a community to absorb through self-adjustment the effects of a certain change in its environment. Gustavo says that chaos is the very essence of life. He asserts that chaos with dynamism is good because it supports the capacity of the system to cure itself. In a chaotic system, self-organization depends on continuous feedback and adjustment. Gustavo believes that Chaos theory can be applied to build dynamic institutions for sustainable environmental management.

In the context of the Paez reconstruction and rehabilitation, Gustavo says that it would have been absurd and impossible to impose from the outside just one neat model of reconstruction and rehabilitation. Instead the program took into account the enormous ethnic, cultural, social and economic diversities of the affected communities, and allowed for each community to define its own terms of rehabilitation. The general plan of reconstruction and rehabilitation for this area could be seen as comprising a list of finished works (such as housing, health and education facilities) on one hand, and a set of consultative, conflict resolving processes to manage the available resources and facilitate self-reconstruction on the other. In conclusion, En El Borde Del Caos, based on a real life experience, represents radical thinking on disasters and sustainable development issues. It is a pity that the book is currently being published only in Spanish. An English version will be much valued by disaster management practitioners and theorists alike.