Commoning amidst Disasters and Dysfunctional States

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Close to three years after the Port blast that destroyed a third of the city of Beirut, who are the multiple actors that have been managing the process of urban recovery, and how to qualify the urban governance process? The governance of disaster in Beirut has been a complex affair, involving a range of actors at multiple levels. International actors rapidly put in place their disaster response protocols, which materialized in an aid platform, the 3RF (Reform, Reconstruction and Recovery Framework for Lebanon). The Lebanese state was late to assign the Army to coordinate a humanitarian relief response in coordination with the International Red Cross and UN-OCHA. Both responses were ineffective and problematic. Dodging the bureaucracy of the aid industry, and filling the resounding void of state deliberate inaction, hundreds of organizations mobilized promptly to provide a range of goods and services to the thousands of victims of the blast. They included national and international Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and Faith-Based Organizations (FBOs), as well as political groups, religious foundations, university groups, professional organizations, and loosely organized initiatives. Remarkably, dozens of organizations received funding from the Lebanese diaspora.  

This presentation tells the story of this organizational response to the Beirut Port blast. We do so in two chapters. The first maps the diverse set of actors who responded to the Beirut Port blast, examining their profiles, modes of operation, collaborations and the range of goods and services they provided. Based on data collected by the Beirut Urban Lab and The Policy Initiative teams, this chapter highlights how actors vary significantly, across identifiers related to nationality, size, age, affiliation and type, allowing us to identify several clusters of actors and networks. Actors also vary according to the different kinds of goods and services provided: while many delivered particularistic goods (such as food packages, cash support and small physical repairs), a sizable number invested in collective goods, that serve a large public, such as the restoration of heritage buildings and the rehabilitation of open spaces, parks and community facilities—interventions typically led by the municipal government normally tasked with such a public role. 

The second chapter investigates the cluster of actors that has invested in these collective goods and argues that their interventions are akin to “practices of commoning,” defined by Lipietz and Bhan (2022) as practices that seek to “expand the use and access to resources through equity,” to create “forms of social, political and affective citizenship” and to contribute to “city-making as emancipatory processes.” We showcase how separate networks of actors—assembling local and international NGOs and FBOs, university-based and professional actors—have been producing increments of (relatively) equitable city-making practices in post-blast Beirut, against multiple odds. We conclude by reflecting on the productive, yet contingent, role of organized groups in advancing commoning in the gloomy context of disaster governance and dysfunctional states.