NEWS

2021.07.30

The 35th Frontier Seminar on “The Contribution of Private Enterprises to Local Disaster Management and Local Economic Development in the Philippines”

On July 13, the 35th AJI Research Frontier Seminar was held online. This time, PhD Candidate Marjorie Resuelleo (Research Fellow of the Asia-Japan Research Institute, Ritsumeikan University) made an informative presentation under the title of “The Contribution of Private Enterprises to Local Disaster Management and Local Economic Development in the Philippines”. Marjorie is conducting an empirical research on local disaster management in the Asia-Pacific region, where typhoons frequently cause major disasters.

In this seminar, she focused on regional disaster management in the Philippines, using two port cities in Leyte, Tacloban and Ormock, as her research subjects. Both cities were devastated by the Typhoon Haiyan in November 2013. However, she pointed out the interesting fact that while community life in Tacloban city was significantly jeopardized by the typhoon, Ormoc city’s population and economic performance were only slightly affected and its recovery from the damage was much faster. Marjorie addressed the quite intriguing question of what made this difference in terms of the contribution of private companies to disaster-resilient urban development in each city, and found that by building a close relationship of trust between private companies and local governments Ormock had made itself resilient in disaster management. After her presentation, participants actively discussed about, for example, which kind of private industries play an important role in disaster management, whether local governments could provide private companies with active support, and so on.

Dr. Rusuello making her presentation

Please visit the following link for previous AJI Frontier Seminars:
: https://en.ritsumei.ac.jp/research/aji/young_researcher/seminar/archive/