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What Taiwan's Typhoon Relocations Tell Us About Managed Retreat
Fieldwork and reflections on post-disaster relocation in Taiwan after Typhoon Morakot (2009)
Based on independent ethnographic field research in Rinari, Taiwan, in summer 2025, supported by a Harvard Fairbank Center graduate research grant.
A longer academic paper is in preparation.
thesis presentation set up, titled The Place Where We All Head To
Making my way to Rinari was a pleasant surprise.
I was sitting in front of the air conditioning unit in my hotel room in Kaohsiung, avoiding a steamy heatwave of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in southern Taiwan, when I booked a B&B called "the most beautiful street corner," located in Rinari, an indigenous village. Getting there was a journey: subway to Kaohsiung station, train to Pingtung, then a long bus ride to Shueimen Bus Station, the end of public transit. My host pulled up in a white mini-car. She seemed a bit surprised that I had come alone by public transit, but soon drove me up the mountains. It did not seem like her first time picking up visitors.
In 2009, Typhoon Morakot brought record-breaking rainfall to these mountains, triggering landslides, debris flows, and flooding. It was the deadliest disaster in Taiwan in two decades. Among those affected, 72% were indigenous people, who predominantly live in state-designated "unsafe zones" in the mountains, close to their livelihood and religious sites but far from urban plains (Wu and Lu 2024).
The government quickly drafted a nationwide relocation program, "Permanent Home," building new settlements at more than 40 sites. Rinari is the second largest. It combines three tribes with different languages and cultures, the Makazayazaya and Tavalan of the Paiwan people and the Kucapungane of the Rukai people, under the same "European-style" pitched steel roofs, situated next to each other and separated by an asphalt road.
The name "Rinari" means "the place where we all head to": a phrase that binds the groups after shared trauma and reflects the hope of stepping into a new future.
Who are "we"? I wondered. And who made the claim, for whom?
children's sketch of the flood and resettlement project outside the indigenous kindergarten, Rinari
Rinari is composed of relocation sites for three indigenous tribes - Paiwan (Makazayazaya/Majia and Tavaran/Dashe) and Rukai (Kucapungan/Haocha) - housed in adjacent but socially distinct neighborhoods. Although the housing stock is uniform, the communities differ in language, governance, history, and access to ancestral land.
A program that worked, on paper.
As climate change intensifies extreme weather events globally, managed retreat and post-disaster relocation have become increasingly urgent policy responses. Yet how success is measured in these programs remains deeply contested. I went to Rinari in the summer of 2025 to see what one of these programs looks like 17 years later.
By many standard measures, Taiwan's response worked. It mobilized fast, built a state-NGO partnership, used science-based risk mapping, brought communities closer to infrastructure and services, and offered livelihood training. But community participation was limited. The state coordinated with NGOs, put together a plan, and then offered it to the community as an option, instead of asking what options the community wanted.
As the architect Hsieh Ying-Chun put it, "reconstruction is not about solving problems that arose after a disaster; it is about addressing the problems that accumulated in the past."
i stayed with the widow of the former chief villager, who runs a home-stay in her house with the extra rooms
at an indigenous scholar's event, i get to meet scholars, and figures from tribal and local government leadership
Resilience is not the same as a good policy
From the outside, Rinari looks like a success. People stayed. Visitors like me come. But what I saw is that the resilience visible in Rinari is not a product of policy design. It is the additional labor communities perform to reconstruct meaningful everyday life within inadequate institutional conditions.
The new settlement left limited residential space for growth and stripped away hunting and planting livelihoods, so many people have moved toward towns and cities. Some young people, who grew up with an imposed Han-Chinese culture, left and came back. They call themselves the "skipped generation," and they are reconnecting with their indigenous identity while also commodifying it for a living.
The same program also produced very different outcomes. Rinari sits on Makazayazaya territory, and their land was not as severely destroyed. The community can still go back to farm, and many see Rinari as an extension of their old settlement. The Kucapungane's habitat was completely destroyed. They have been relocated three times already, and the new site is far away from their field. Same houses, same policy, very different lives.
The land itself carries a history, too. Rinari sits on the traditional field of the Makazayazaya. The colonial government took the land forcibly, the Taiwan Sugar Corporation took it over, and the current government took it from the corporation. A relocation plan that treats land as a coordinate does not erase that history. It inherits it.
the view of the church next to my stay.
Why this matters beyond Taiwan
I would argue that the adaptive responses communities have developed should not be celebrated as a "bottom-up" win against the state-led "top-down" approach, but understood as constrained navigation.
This is not only a question of fairness. When governments read a community's hard work as proof that a program succeeded, they design the next program on the same model. The costs stay where nobody is measuring them: lost livelihoods, young people leaving, and land questions that outlast the housing. Funders and insurers looking at adaptation projects face the same blind spot.
More participation helps, but it is not the full answer. Despite ongoing advocacy for participatory design, both top-down and bottom-up approaches can remain organized within the same decision-making system, where place-based knowledge is treated as cultural data to incorporate, not as a knowledge framework with independent standing. In other cases in Taiwan, indigenous communities refused to use the government's planned evacuation shelters and chose privately owned shelters instead (Lin and Chang 2020). A plan can be technically sound and still not be used when it counts.
So I would call for relocation frameworks that distinguish between community resilience and institutional adequacy. That means asking what a program provided and what residents had to build on top of it; whether people kept access to their land and livelihoods, not only a house; who stays and who leaves, and in which generation; and whether the new site's land is settled in the eyes of the people living on it.
the house of Rukai's chief added iconography and symbols to the standardized wall, emphasizing their status
Back to "we"
I keep coming back to the name. "The place where we all head to." When many different people are placed under one roof design and one name, the "we" is decided for them before they arrive.
For anyone designing the next relocation program, asking who "we" is should not be the last question. It should be the first.
this Paiwan family turned their first floor into a cafe, in which the grandmother sell fresh coffee, from beans the grandfather and father grow at their old settlement.
a elderly lady taking classes on how to make their traditional costume, led by local government
the city's trash truck will come in at 7am every morning, playing radios to encourage villagers to "build a clean taiwan together"
