Disaster resilience, vulnerability and adaptive capacity of street children in Manila

Abstract

This thesis investigates the resilience of street children in Manila, the Philippines, who are exposed to multiple natural disasters. Despite their longstanding presence and high visibility in urban areas, street children have attracted little scholarly attention. However, a surge of interest in the global street child phenomenon spurred by the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child seeks to produce more nuanced contextual analysis of the social, economic and political processes that affect the demography of street children in a specific geographic area. Despite such efforts, the street child discourse continues to be dominated by contrasting, and at times competing, government and civil society interests, while academic inquiry remains stifled by typological, methodological and ethical dilemmas. The following study contributes to addressing that void by exploring these research challenges and investigating them with a mixed method examination of street children and their health, education and resilience in Manila, the Philippines. While most academic inquiry has been limited to investigating the children’s vulnerability, this study applies a strengths-based, adaptive capacity framework to examine the resilience of Manila’s street children in spite of the multiple stressors of street life and frequent natural disasters. Manila, home to an estimated 50,000 street children, is prone to frequent natural hazards including floods, typhoons, and landslides. Disaster vulnerability in Manila is exacerbated by political corruption and socio-economic inequalities, which provide a particularly dynamic lens through which to examine the influence of governance and civil society on the adaptive capacity of this population. While adaptive capacity is generally studied at a systems scale, this research explores how street children's adaptive capacity may vary spatially by the resources available to them and their cognitive social capital, defined here as their perceptions of trust and belonging to a community. In addition to the exploration of the children’s adaptive capacity, this study seeks to identify and analyse current strategies, methodologies, and gaps in the research on street children to provide guidance for future studies. Understanding and fostering the capacity of this highly adaptive population of street children may prove invaluable to generating the larger scale transformations necessary for residents of Manila to better adapt to natural disasters and other stressors in the future.