- When a tsunami killed tens of thousands of people in Indonesia’s Aceh province, international donors contributed billions of dollars to disaster recovery efforts
- Today, gaps in post-disaster recovery are still visible. A breakdown of community dynamics post-disaster limited the effectiveness of some initiatives.
- The example of Aceh provides lessons to be learned for future disaster recoveries under the “build back better” approach, including the importance of long-term thinking when it comes to such initiatives.
BANDA ACEH, Indonesia — Aceh is one of those destinations that glimmer chimerically on the horizon, alluring with its newness, but ever receding, ever retreating in memory with the passage of time. There are picturesque cliffs to the west if you drive on the coastal highway from capital city of Banda Aceh to the town of Calang, with the pristine, azure sea swirling foam to the east. Against the backdrop of colorful jetties are small shops decorated with curtains made by dangling threads of dried fish, octopuses splayed out like kites, and even stingrays. The threads twist and sway in the salty breeze like wind charms, the more browned portions of seafood skin shimmering in the sunlight, as humming women with infants tied in slings around their chests dole out anchovies on tarp-lined wooden tables. The older children run around their fishermen fathers closer to the water, unable to recall a time of catastrophe.
Nearly 15 years ago, Aceh, a province on the northwestern tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, was severely hit by a 9.1 magnitude undersea earthquake that triggered one of the world’s biggest natural disasters. Massive waves rose up to 30 meters (100 feet) the day after Christmas in 2004, just 255 kilometers (160 miles) southeast of Banda Aceh. Nearly 230,000 people were reported dead or missing across a dozen countries; Indonesia itself accounted for nearly 168,000 of them. Much of Aceh was flattened, and television crews from around the world arrived to broadcast mountains of rubble, flatlands of black mud, and white shrouds filling up mass graves. Soon after, agencies — nonprofits, foreign governments, and aid organizations — teamed up for Aceh’s resurrection with an ambitious motto to “build back better.” The tsunami had acted as a circuit breaker to a three-decade-long separatist war between the Indonesian government and the Free Aceh Movement, or GAM, and along with the peace, the recovery efforts aimed at the socioeconomic betterment of the locals.
Nearly 500 agencies teamed up to raise an unparalleled amount of funding at that time that totaled up to $7.7 billion. Within a four-year period, they prioritized newer and stronger infrastructure for the province and built 140,000 homes, close to 3,700 kilometers (2,300 miles) of road — including the western coastal highway rebuilt by USAID — 1,700 schools, 1,000 government buildings, and 36 airports and seaports. The physical spine of Aceh was spectacular; however, under tight deadlines and pressure from private donors for visible results, there were no quick fixes for tackling long-term drivers of vulnerability such as livelihood and social recovery. Now, 15 years later, gaps in post-disaster recovery are still visible. Unable to sustain growth despite the infrastructure, Aceh remains extremely poverty-ridden as per recent reports, with a slow economy and high unemployment rate.
Ever since the 2004 tsunami, the aspirational phrase “build back better” has found its way into several disaster recovery plans and guidelines, including the U.N.-endorsed Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. This story looks back at Aceh to see what lessons have been learned to make that goal more inclusive of livelihoods in affected areas — particularly the case of fisheries in Aceh, which provided direct employment for more than 80,000 people, or 16 percent of the total coastal population, prior to the tsunami.
Boats not worth using
Sharifuddin sits repairing his lobster cages in a decrepit harbor in the tsunami-affected town of Calang nearly three hours away from Banda Aceh on the highway, on a platform overlooking a pier full of boats and canoes. The air is filled with the rotting smell of garbage. Nearby, there is an abandoned fuel pump (recently constructed but unused), and an empty marketplace filled with nylon ropes and plastic. There is a concrete pier, but the fishermen loading their boats use a wooden one they built themselves, claiming that the former splashes water and floods their vessels. Just a little ahead of where most of the boats are moored, a man floats on top of a rubber tire in green, murky water, trying to catch fish.

Two big white boats decay on the sandbank. In their prime, the vessels would have outshone any other boat along this pier. But several years later, they have been eaten away by salt and time. “Not worth using,” Sharifuddin says. The boats were donated by nonprofits as part of the assistance programs after the tsunami, but they were never used. According to Sharifuddin, they were too light and not suited for the waves and wind in Aceh. Another white-and-blue boat donated by the Japanese rests unused under casuarina trees on Lamreh beach, an hour from downtown Banda Aceh.
In 2004, there were 15,576 fishing boats in Aceh, according to a study based on data from the provincial fisheries department. Then the tsunami hit and the fishing community suffered exorbitantly, both in human and material loss: nearly 10,000 fishers lost their lives and close to 70 percent of Aceh’s small-scale fleet was destroyed. By 2008, the number of boats had increased to 17,584, thanks to development assistance. But by 2011, after the aid agencies had left, the number of boats in Aceh dropped back to 15,995. Research claims that this decline was due largely to poor-quality and inappropriate boats donated by the NGOs.
The aid agencies tried solving problems in an expedited time frame without adequate assessment of requirements, through a deluge of short-term recovery programs, cash grants and immediate distribution of boats and gear that would result in visible impact for the media and donors. The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported that the agencies did not have the technical capacity to provide the right inputs, and some of them chose to ignore scientific standards and norms in the eagerness to provide aid. Boats were made with poorly selected timber, inadequate through-hull fittings and pipework, and thin planking. The agencies did not monitor their boat-building programs sufficiently, and some commissioned builders took on more projects than they could deliver adequately, compromising the quality of the vessels.

During the construction tizzy, there was a concern of overfishing due to an excess number of boats. Eventually, as the vessels started to fail, the FAO recommended that unsafe boats not be handed over to beneficiaries but be modified or even broken up.
Michael Boyland, a researcher at the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), found similar cases in the city of Tacloban in the Philippines that was devastated by Typhoon Haiyan in 2013. The city government also claimed to use “build back better” as one of the central approaches to its disaster recovery program. Boats were provided that were not usable, so many people repurposed the wood for shelters and furniture. The donor markings are still visible on homemade tables in some cases. “Of course coordination in disasters of this [large] scale is not easy, but I think it is also driven by a need to be doing something helpful in the immediate aftermath, and there is not always time to sufficiently plan and consult everybody before acting — especially when there are lives at stake,” Boyland says. He suggests disaster preparation before the event to map out tentative allocation of resources across the spectrum of immediate response and recovery interventions as much as possible.
Impact on traditional fishing platforms
Back in Aceh, Zulfikar, a 43-year-old fisherman, drives his worn-out red boat from his fish ponds to a brightly colored contraption in the waters several kilometers off the coast of his village, Lhok Seudu, which is along the west coast of Aceh, 35 kilometers from Banda Aceh’s city center. Anchored atop two boats is a platform that he and eight or nine other fishermen use during the eastern monsoons, attracting fish at night using lamps. When dawn breaks, they return to the waterfront in their boats to sell their catch.
This traditional fishing vessel is known as a palong. When the tsunami hit Aceh, it also devastated several palongs along its coastline. Fishermen could not afford to rebuild the destroyed communal platforms, so the agencies stepped in. John McCarthy, a development specialist at the Australian National University, surveyed some of the new palongs eight years after the disaster and found only a few of them to be working, depending one major factor: how long after the tsunami the palongs were rebuilt.
The Singapore Red Cross sponsored local builders to construct five palongs in the surveyed villages. By 2012, four of them were still operating. The nonprofit had initiated the project after enough time had passed since the tsunami and the local fishers felt comfortable returning to the sea. The main fishing village oversaw the platforms’ operation, with each hamlet head supervising an individual palong. There was enough time and space given for the community to self-organize and distribute benefits and responsibilities. The palong heads learned to repair the platforms and to protect the asset as private owners.

In contrast, the Asian Development Bank funded the construction of six palongs. By 2012, none of the platforms were in operation. Commissions by Oxfam and USAID in neighboring villages faced similar fates. As per McCarthy’s study, each of the unsuccessful projects had been initiated immediately after the tsunami, when the villagers were not psychologically motivated to go back to the sea and were dependent directly on emergency relief. The projects were also handed to fishing cooperatives or user groups set up by the agencies outside accepted local authority structures. In each case, the villagers had either failed to maintain the palong or had experienced internal conflicts within the cooperatives, or the cooperative had fallen into debt. Processes were not set up in detail for these community groups, and a lack of ownership and accountability resulted in a plethora of financial problems that led to some of the palongs being abandoned or sold.
Including indigenous community networks
The deficiencies in group management arose from the breakdown of community dynamics post-disaster. The old, indigenous enforcement institution for fisheries in Acehnese communities is known as panglima laot, which roughly translates to “sea commander.” This system has date back up to 400 years, to the time when Aceh was a sultanate. The name also doubles up for the leader of the fishing community, the most learned and experienced individual in fishing practices, who ensures that the rules of the sea, or hukom adat laot, are followed — for instance, no trawlers and explosives are allowed for fishing to prevent environmental degradation. One of the tragedies of the tsunami was the death of 59 of 193 of these customary leaders in different pockets, and with them the loss of local knowledge and an interconnected functional community. The coastal members who survived the tsunami almost immediately elected their new panglima laot, but in many cases, the new leaders were often either very young and inexperienced, or elderly and unprepared to take on the responsibility. Many who were not full-time fishing skippers got elected. The fishery projects that were evaluated to be successful by researchers in the post-disaster recovery process engaged in strengthening of these social structures.

However, research done by Boyland and his colleagues from SEI in 2015 revealed that many of the local fishing communities led by their panglima laot did not embrace the ambitious aim of “building back better” within the mandated recovery time frame. Instead, they wanted to return to their pre-tsunami livelihoods.
One example of this is Baharuddin, one of the surviving chiefs in Lam Teungoh village, who had vehemently opposed the government’s proposal of a coastal buffer that prohibited permanent construction of new buildings within a 2-kilometer (1.2-mile) radius of low-lying coastal areas. Fishermen like him must live by the sea, he explains, despite the fact that he lost almost every member of his family in the tsunami — his father, mother, brother, sister, wife, teenage son and four daughters, including a 1-month-old infant. “I said to the government, before you ask me [to relocate], you ask the people who live close to the sea in Jakarta,” he laughs. The people who live by the ocean in Indonesia’s capital are as dependent on it for livelihood as his community is in Aceh. Widespread resistance to the coastal buffer finally led to the government rescinding its prohibition in mid-2005.
Boyland attributes this to the failed pantomime between the aid agencies and the people: “Fairly soon after the disaster, the United Nations, represented by Bill Clinton and the NGOs were pushing for a ‘build back better’ approach — saying ‘let’s use this as an opportunity to make these places better than they were before.’ But was ‘build-back better’ well-defined and commonly understood beyond principles? Were the people of Aceh consulted on this? Was the historical context of Aceh fully understood by outside actors? Arguably, not nearly enough in all cases.”
According to Boyland, the balance lies in keeping livelihood central to different aspects of post-disaster recovery such as housing reconstruction, relocation, community participation, and infrastructure. Livelihood is primarily thought of in terms of income, he says, but is in fact a more durable solution that encompasses human, financial, natural, physical and social needs.
Multidimensional recovery
The overall story of fisheries in Aceh is one of inconsistent progress, and 15 years later, this has contributed to Aceh’s economic slump, even with the new infrastructure. There is corroding poverty and high unemployment. However, certain slip-ups were inevitable given the scale of destruction. Aceh remains a sufficiently well-documented model in post-disaster recovery practices due to the volume of unprecedented multi-donor funding that was pumped into a developing nation, and the urgency that came with it.
But Aceh’s current situation cannot be attributed solely to shortcomings in post-disaster recovery 15 years ago. Its plight is due heavily to a plethora of local vectors such as political power dynamics after decades of conflict in a semi-autonomous province, improper resource utilization, and lack of official accountability. As local activist and former World Bank consultant Muslahuddin Daud likes to put it, “Aceh is ready to fight, but not to grow.” But what merits special thought for better positive outcomes, according to him, is the need for sufficient investment of time for aid; one that divides funding into phases for emergency response, and then reconstruction and long-term recovery efforts. This is a lesson that has been picked up by the city of Tacloban, at least in theory: according to the central planning document, goals were divided into early recovery projects (shelter, livelihood, infrastructure restoration) to be completed within three years, and longer-term developmental projects to be implemented between three and nine years after Haiyan.
The world has moved on to other calamities since Aceh, but the province still harbors lessons for the future behind its veil of freshly paved roads and new buildings. Ask the people living around the fishing boat resting on the first floor of a house inland in Banda Aceh. The traces of struggle amid the resilience are not hard to find.
Banner: Khairullah, a fisherman, leans against an abandoned boat donated by Japan on Lamreh beach in Aceh.
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