Disasters, Duties and Dependencies: Malawian civil servants in disaster relief interventions

IAS Visiting Fellow Dr Tanja D. Hendriks delivers a seminar on their research - 

Malawi is a donor-dependent country in southern Africa, at the forefront of experiencing the intensifying impacts of climate change. Its Department of Disaster Management Affairs (DODMA) is responsible for the coordination of disaster governance and relief interventions, but profoundly reliant on donor-funding to do so. Based on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the aftermath of Cyclone Idai (2019), Cyclone Freddy (2023) and an El Niňo-induced drought (2024), I zoom in on different characteristics of disaster governance, to show how despite its lack of resources and actual capacity to deal with them, the state is central to relief interventions. Detailing how DODMA civil servants navigated the demands placed on them by colleagues, citizens, chiefs and (international) collaborators as they attempted to fulfil their duties, I suggest that these interventions throw the state itself into relief and render visible civil servants’ sense of duty as well as what it is up against.

Arrivals from 11:45 am for a 12:00 noon start. For those joining in-person, lunch will be served after the seminar from 1:00pm.

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