Translocal disaster interventions: The role of individual relief channels in Philippine disasters

The disaster-prone Philippine archipelago is a major sender of migrants worldwide. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Philippines and Denmark, this article investigates how individual migrants channelled relief to their neighbourhoods of origin after the Bohol earthquake of 2013. I argue that such individual relief channels both complement and conflict with official disaster responses because they form part of local collective coping mechanisms in a way that contradict equity as a principle of distributive justice, and, on the level of practical implementation, poses challenges to aspirations to distribute relief equally. Drawing attention to the practice of excluding the migrants' households of origin from receiving targeted aid, the article suggests that disaster management should reconsider how remittances flow in disasters.