Purpose Livestock systems are fundamental to food security, yet post-disaster recovery research frequently overlooks agriculture. On 6 February 2023, two earthquakes struck south-eastern Türkiye and northern Syria, devastating a region central to national livestock production. This study examines how farmers experienced the disaster, managed disruptions and navigated recovery. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative descriptive design captured the experiences of 21 affected livestock farmers through semi-structured interviews in May 2024. Data were analysed via reflexive thematic analysis with data triangulation, and interpreted through global disaster frameworks including the Livestock Emergency Guidelines and Standards and the Five Domains Model. Findings The central concept “Broken Production System, Strong Community” captures failures participants described across shelter, water, feed, labour and market access, alongside production decline, distress sales and compromised animal welfare. Participants reported that formal aid meaningfully supported registered farmers, that uneven distribution and bureaucratic hurdles limited access for others, and that informal social networks substantially compensated for these limitations; the small insured subset linked coverage to deeper recovery. Originality/value Addressing an empirical gap on livestock recovery after a mega-earthquake, the study shows that agricultural recovery is shaped by the structural mismatch between formal governance mechanisms and the adaptive capacity of informal social capital. It offers “Broken Production System, Strong Community” as an empirically grounded, conditionally transferable analytical tool and, as a producer-informed hypothesis, suggests integrating informal resilience mechanisms into formal disaster governance.
Purpose This study examines what happens when rapid volunteer mobilization expands faster than the capacity to organize heterogeneous people, information, resources and tasks during disaster response. Design/methodology/approach The study uses a single embedded qualitative process design centered on a rapidly scaled, messaging-mediated volunteer response following a September 2025 barrier-lake flood in eastern Taiwan. The primary process evidence consists of contemporaneous records from the focal coordination group, supplemented by targeted traces from task-specific subgroups, two public forums, nine semi-structured interviews, five fieldnote-based observations and open-ended volunteer accounts. Findings Mobilization-generated coordination strain became visible through repeated verification, misrouting, uneven task allocation, stale or ambiguous requests and situations in which volunteers or resources accumulated in some locations while remaining needed elsewhere. The analysis identifies three recurrent forms of workflow repair: functional differentiation, boundary regulation and intermediary translation. These practices were observably enacted and reused, but repair remained partial, uneven and subject to changing task demand, participant learning, formal intervention and safety constraints. Originality/value The study distinguishes the capacity to mobilize help from the capacity to organize what has been mobilized. It conceptualizes workflow repair as an episode-level, problem-triggered process linking an identifiable coordination breakdown to targeted reconfiguration of an already operating workflow, observable uptake or reuse and a bounded process consequence or incomplete repair after volunteer mobilization has already scaled.
Purpose Indigenous Environmental Knowledge (IEK) remains central to disaster risk reduction in many African communities; however, its contribution to flood resilience, especially across different cultural groups, is under-examined in Nigeria. Previous Nigerian flood research has concentrated on physical and infrastructural drivers, with little comparative attention to how cultural knowledge systems vary across ethnolinguistic groups. This study addresses this gap by comparing how IEK shapes flood anticipation, interpretation, and response across nine communities representing the Yorùbá of Ogun State, the Nupe of Kwara State, and the Igbo of Enugu State. Design/methodology/approach Between January and March 2025, data were collected through 36 focus group discussions with 362 participants, including men, women, youth, and persons with disabilities. Data were analysed thematically and complemented by participatory ranking of practices. Findings Findings reveal that IEK shapes flood response through three interrelated domains: practical engineering improvisations (drainage clearing, wooden bridges, sandbags, canoes), collective labour mobilized through culturally embedded governance systems (bell-ringing summons, emirate structures, kinship obligations), and spiritual-ethical practices tied to cosmology and land (ritual offerings, water-use taboos, ecological early-warning indicators). Ecological indicators such as fish species, frogs, rainfall patterns, and tree phenology remain widely used but increasingly blend with radio and phone alerts. Despite recurring losses, destroyed crops, contaminated water, damaged homes, communities across all three groups consistently refuse relocation, citing ancestral identity, livelihoods, and spiritual obligations to land. Originality/value The findings suggest that, in these settings, IEK operates as an integrated system linking technical adaptation, collective governance, and moral-ecological meaning, offering culturally grounded pathways for disaster resilience. Integrating these knowledge systems into formal flood governance could strengthen community-centred anticipatory action in Nigeria.
Purpose In Indigenous communities where governance integrates land, ancestors and more-than-human beings, standardised risk assessments overlooking relational ontologies may produce incomplete evaluations and inadvertently deepen vulnerabilities. This article analyses ontological frictions in disaster risk assessment (DRA) arising from the encounter between standardised frameworks and Indigenous relational ontologies enacted through governance systems. Design/methodology/approach Six weeks of ethnographic fieldwork in Yaqui communities of Sonora, Mexico, including interviews (n = 35), focus groups (n = 5), participant observation, participatory mapping and archival review. Analysis identified instances where positivist risk categories encountered limits when engaging with Yaqui conceptions of territory, causality and agency. Findings Three ontological frictions emerged: (1) spatial segmentation conflicts with territory as an integral entity structured by lu'uturia yo'owe, a Yaqui cosmogonic governance principle; (2) framing phenomena as climate exposure abstracts political agents into environmental factors, depoliticising territorial conflict and dissolving relational accountability; (3) analytical translation recasts governance-constitutive entities as cultural descriptors, obscuring their organising role and rendering governance invisible to assessment instruments. Practical implications Where relational ordering prevails, the absence of recognisable administrative infrastructure requires consideration of other sources of such infrastructure. Meaningful engagement therefore requires interrogating the ontological assumptions embedded in assessment tools, not just enhancing culturally sensitive consultation. Originality/value This article empirically demonstrates how ontological frictions permeate DRA processes and advances the concept of instrument deficit as an analytical lens for risk governance in Indigenous contexts shaped by climate and territorial pressures.
