We were stood on the station awaiting the train that would take us back to St Pancras on the final day of my visit to Loughborough with the IAS, when we had a moment of realization regarding many of the interesting discussions we’d been having all week around the concept of disaster data. Our train was delayed, and with the departure of my Eurostar train looming, we became increasingly invested in checking the indicated yet constantly changing times and information on the screens and listening to the announcements in the station, even though we could not really act on it. The train was 5 minutes delayed, then 10, eventually it was simply ‘delayed’, before again being only 7 minutes behind schedule. The access to up-to-the-minute (entirely inaccurate) ‘data’ caused increasing stress as a potentially missed Eurostar connection approached.

When our train eventually showed up after (only!) a 15-minute delay, we concluded that the provision of more information did not make us feel more in control at all, but it did make us feel more responsible for making the right decision (i.e. do we wait, do we take a taxi?) – even though there weren’t really any other viable and affordable options. Where it is perhaps unfair to compare navigating the UK railway system to dealing with disaster responses in Malawi, it is this heightened sense of experienced responsibility that formed the basis of many of our conversations throughout the week with IAS.

I am an anthropologist who studies the state, bureaucracy, disasters and development in Malawi; a donor-dependent and disaster-prone country in southern Africa where dystopian climate change scenarios are unfolding. In line with global agreements such as the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, states are primarily responsible for dealing with disasters in their territories, although it is increasingly recognized that some may need additional assistance in order to be able to do so. Malawi is one of these states: in the last ten years, it declared a ‘state of disaster’ eight times, struggling to respond to cyclones, droughts and floods. With the majority of its population dependent on rain-fed subsistence agriculture to survive, the weather has immediate effects on food security and the country’s wider economy. Each of the declarations of disaster represented separate disaster events, but their effects on the ground are profoundly cumulative, making it increasingly difficult and costly for the Malawi state to cope with the impacts of climate change. Using ethnographic methods, my work has focused on civil servants of the Malawi government Department of Disaster Management Affairs (DODMA) and the ways in which they perform their duties.

For my PhD research I focused on district-level civil servants as they dealt with Cyclone Idai (2019), which affected more than one million Malawians. To do so, DODMA relied on donor-funding for most of its activities, meaning civil servants collaborated with numerous non-state actors. Spending 12 months studying their everyday practices of governing I was struck by the disconnect between my own observations and the descriptions of Malawian/African bureaucrats as venal and indifferent, prevalent in academia and the development industry. Rather, I found ample empirical evidence that the under-resourced and overstretched civil servants I studied attempted to do their jobs well, despite difficult circumstances. This led me to argue that we cannot properly understand everyday state functioning without taking into account civil servants’ sense of duty. My current postdoctoral research project builds on this finding but focuses on national-level DODMA civil servants, studying their aspirations, motivations and the moral obligations they experience in relation to their work. I conducted fieldwork in the aftermath of Cyclone Freddy (2023) and the recent El Nino induced drought (2024-2025), which is when I came across the work of (soon to be Dr.) George Foden.

George and I had connected on social media in the fall of 2023, as he was preparing for a fieldwork visit to Malawi. He had experience working in the humanitarian sector and our conversations quickly revolved around how disaster relief interventions and recovery projects are experienced differently across the state/non-state divide. This, despite the fact that the entire disaster governance system is set up to facilitate state/non-state collaborations, and despite the fact that the state/non-state divide is not particularly pronounced in Malawi: many of the individuals involved move across state and non-state organisations throughout their careers, and – partly due to the regular occurrence of disasters – are well acquainted with each other. Based on our different starting points, our discussions moved into many directions, covering themes such as the meaning(s) of disaster data, project-based interventions, sustainability trade-offs between present and future responses, and how collaborations can be contested or accepted – overtly and in more subtle ways. Wanting to discuss and collaborate more ourselves, I got the opportunity to visit the IAS, where I was hosted by George.

Early January 2025 we spent a week continuing our discussions during a wide-range of activities. I was introduced to the IAS, the Loughborough campus, the PhD students in George’s office – with whom we went out for dinner to the local carvery, a culinary highlight of my stay! – and George organized a Playtest for the disaster governance game that I have been developing together with two Serious Game artists. Played at the IAS with a group of disaster scholars, I received valuable feedback on the prototype which seeks to allow game players to walk a mile in Malawian civil servants’ shoes during disaster relief interventions. The final day of my stay in Loughborough was spent visiting the Loughborough London campus with George and we also managed to connect with people at the Centre for Disaster Protection and (Malawi-focused) scholars at University College London.

It was in these discussions with new colleagues at LU and beyond that our thoughts around disaster data began to coalesce. I presented on my research at the IAS, highlighting the pressures that civil servants are put under to collect data to inform responses and the importance of “getting the numbers right”, something that means very different things to different people. In discussions with George, we found similar experiences on the part of NGO staff and civil servants in attempting to make effective decisions based on limited or absent information, as well as expectations from above that data could be presented to inform funding and operational decisions far away from the sites of disasters. We spoke with many colleagues about different funding mechanisms for disaster preparedness and response, considering the ways in which international donors operationalize finance streams to support disaster response, and what this necessitates that national actors must do in order to be accountable to their funders. Often this can result in a top-down accountability structure for civil servants aiming to “get their numbers right” to appeal to potential donors, at the expense of accountability to affected populations. This is one of the key topics that George and I are hoping to explore further in a future paper, as we share the view that the pressure placed on practitioners to deliver up-to-date data to inform decision making processes adds significant stress to everyone involved whilst, often, failing to support actors in their efforts to make the ‘right’ decisions during a time of crisis. That may be as true in the offices of DODMA as it is while waiting on a train station watching the minutes to your Eurostar departure tick down!

I thoroughly enjoyed my stay at IAS Loughborough and hope to be able to visit again in the future!

Dr Tanja D. Hendriks