Narratives on natural disaster and resilience: planification vs. Reality in post-eruption penipe, Ecuador

Resumen

Radioactive tephra fallout, landslides, and incandescent rocks have shaken the agricultural economy around the Tungurahua volcano in Ecuador since at least 1999. The events of 2006 involved a narrative offensive, based on the prevailing discourse of intervening international organizations, and a new credit policy, primarily aimed at productive diversification. Documents from that period were compared with two recent investigations: a geological-transdisciplinary study from 2022, and a more recent investigation, prompted by this research, in the town of Penipe. These investigations revealed that not only the designed policy was not successful, but that there were also no records of the strategic shifts chosen by farmers toward monoculture and indoor animal husbandry in response to the need to survive the pressures of the context and the uncertainty. The study concludes with a reflection on the gap between the formal intentions of the narratives of international organizations and governments (the formal narrative) and the situational reality on the ground, for the design of future policies.