Floods, Blame, and Community Resilience: Regional and Local Responses to Natural Disasters in Qazaqstan

In Spring 2024, Qazaqstan was hit with unprecedented floods leaving hundreds dead and thousands evacuated. In some communities, the locals took the initiative to develop the necessary infrastructure, while in others they mostly relied on governmental help to arrive. Responses on the regional level also varied: some akims (local executives) took some measures, while others attempted to diffuse the responsibility. Local communities across the country before the floods struggled with the deficits of human, social, institutional, economic, physical, and environmental capital. Blame-shifting is a natural response to these developments, but it also might undermine interpersonal and institutional trust, which is important for resilience and capacity-building.

We test the implications of this theory by leveraging the variation in the level of exposure to floods and local responses to floods in Qazaqstan. Specifically, we are interested in the following questions: How do local communities respond to flood crises and what explains the variation across regions and communities? How do the local communities mobilize resources and what underpins successful mobilization? And how do the residents of the affected areas assign responsibility for handling the crisis? We use a combination of computational linguistics, public opinion surveys, and fieldwork to document the variation in individual- and community-level responses to floods.