Street-level bureaucrats reveal why post-tsunami recovery stalls in Chile

Ten years after a magnitude 8.3 earthquake and tsunami struck the coast of Coquimbo, Chile, a qualitative study of the public officials who ran the recovery argues that the deepest obstacle to sustainable coastal reconstruction is not geology but governance. The research, published in the journal Anthropocene Coasts, examines how rigid territorial planning instruments collided with the risk perceptions of a community whose members were born, raised and work on the shore, and how frontline officials improvised their way through the resulting frictions.

The study focuses on the earthquake of 16 September 2015, whose epicenter lay near Illapel at a depth of about 22 to 23 kilometers on the interface between the Nazca and South American plates. The rupture spread over roughly 200 kilometers, from the northern tip of the Talinay Peninsula to Los Vilos, and the tsunami that followed registered waves of 4.4 meters, flood heights of 6.0 to 6.2 meters at the innermost point of Coquimbo Bay, and run-ups between 6.5 and 7.8 meters. Damage to light structures, networks and services was documented, along with several tons of debris, flooding of residential buildings in the city’s flood zone, displacement of people and fatalities.

The research team, led by Sonia Salas-Bravo and Angelo Araya-Piñones, used grounded theory and ethnographic techniques to interview ten institutional officials from public administration, civil protection and risk management who had worked during the events and knew the Baquedano Neighborhood, an old residential-commercial settlement near the coastline and the Port of Coquimbo. The sample, drawn by convenience criteria, averaged 49.3 years of age, comprised eight men and two women, and included nine participants with completed higher education. Data collection took place three years after the disaster, through ten semi-structured interviews of roughly one hour and fifteen minutes each, supplemented by 25 field visits over six months recorded in field notes and analyzed with thematic content analysis in AtlasTi 20, generating 125 codes.

The interviews reveal what the authors call a critical decoupling between rigid territorial planning instruments and dynamic community risk perceptions rooted in place attachment. Officials described residents with a strong connection to the sea and acknowledged that the state cannot relocate a community against its will, even where the area is technically considered uninhabitable because of the constant threat. The neighborhood sits on a low marine terrace roughly five meters above mean sea level, composed of fine marine sediments with poor drainage and a shallow water table, conditions that favor extensive horizontal penetration of tsunami flow compared with cliff-bound sectors.

Officials also drew a sharp distinction between how communities relate to earthquakes and to tsunamis. Living in one of the world’s most seismically active countries, citizens are used to earthquakes and accept them, the participants said, but the unpredictable nature and destructive potential of tsunamis severely hampered evacuation, leaving very little time to act. One official rejected the theoretical planning assumption outright, saying there is no such thing as a 15-minute evacuation period. At the same time, officials felt technically validated by their logistical capacity to evacuate more than 8,000 people in ten minutes, an operational success that contrasted sharply with elderly residents who ultimately refused to leave their homes.

The analysis identifies three systemic barriers to coastal adaptation: institutional inertia, the marginalization of psychosocial factors in technical protocols, and conflict between physical safety mandates and local socioeconomic habitability. The friction was visible in concrete decisions. When demolition teams moved into damaged areas, officials reported significant sociopolitical friction in attempting to evacuate vulnerable zones, recognizing that the state cannot force people to leave but also cannot invest resources where no mitigation measure is associated. During the recovery phase, some families stockpiled surplus relief supplies, including as many as 25 beds, to sell, transforming homes into what officials described as looking like a warehouse, which forced institutions to adapt their selection processes on the fly and bypass standard protocols so that aid reached those who truly needed it.

These behaviors are central to the study’s theoretical framing. The officials occupy the position that political scientist Michael Lipsky called street-level bureaucrats, frontline workers responsible for many of the most important activities of public agencies, and the authors argue they are not mere executors of policy but active policy shapers caught between top-down state mandates and bottom-up community demands. Their discretionary adaptations, such as advocating vertical evacuation and mixed-use zoning, are described as pragmatic compromises that maintain social peace and enable adaptive capacity, yet simultaneously expose the failure of traditional planning instruments to accommodate dynamic risks. The authors note that such dynamics remain less explored in the Global South, where cultural and institutional contexts differ from those of the Global North.

The study also documents a tangible example of vulnerability and adaptation in the relocation of the Teletón Rehabilitation Center, which had operated in the Baquedano Neighborhood since 2003 at about five meters above sea level. The tsunami’s wave train reached six meters in height in the Teletón area, flooding the building and destroying nearly 95 percent of its work materials, forcing care to continue in temporary facilities for a reduced number of patients. A return to normal operations took almost six years, until 2021, when new facilities opened in a non-flood zone at about 40 meters above sea level and more than 1,500 meters from the coastline. The center now serves more than 1,600 patients per year from the Coquimbo region and conducts over 29,000 consultations without the potential risk of tsunami flooding.

From the coded narratives the researchers constructed two contrasting future scenarios for the neighborhood. In the dominant scenario, officials envision radical urban regeneration: a commercial hub and first-rate port linked to international investment, with strict zoning requiring non-habitable ground floors repurposed as parking or recreational space to enable vertical evacuation, inspired by the Japanese model, and with floodwaters channeled into local wetlands to absorb the impact rather than relying on invasive barriers such as giant walls. But the authors warn this technocratic vision presupposes the disappearance of the current vulnerable population through state-sponsored expropriation, replacing historic residential blocks with green spaces and modernized infrastructure in a way that risks gentrifying post-disaster space. The contrasting scenario assumes institutional inertia: an outdated regulatory plan more than ten years old that does not classify the area as high-risk, stagnant development limited to the professionalization of existing auto repair shops, and a neighborhood spatially and economically marginalized by large commercial projects in safer areas of the city.

Based on these findings, the authors propose three policy directions: institutionalizing psychosocial resilience in relocation protocols by formally training street-level bureaucrats to manage place attachment; redesigning territorial planning instruments to shift from binary prohibition-versus-free-use policies toward mixed resilience zoning that embeds social variables in a legally binding manner while allowing conditional economic use under highly redundant construction standards; and establishing closed-loop risk governance through binding post-disaster governance councils that translate frontline officials’ field experiences into legislative change. The authors are candid about the study’s limitations: the sample of ten participants, the overrepresentation of male officials at 80 percent, which may overlook gender differences in disaster governance, and a convenience sampling strategy constrained by officials’ availability and willingness to recall a disaster years afterward. The findings are qualitative reflections from a single case, not measurements of policy effectiveness, but they document a governance gap the authors argue is particularly acute in the Global South, where institutional rigidity often clashes with rapid coastal urbanization and complex social realities.

Subject of Research: Post-disaster coastal risk governance in Chile after the 2015 Illapel earthquake and tsunami

Article Title: Governing risk in Anthropocene coasts: institutional frictions and social resilience in post-tsunami Chile

Article References: Salas-Bravo, S., Araya-Piñones, A., Quezada, X. C., Bodini-Salas, A., & Bakit, J. (2026). Governing risk in Anthropocene coasts: institutional frictions and social resilience in post-tsunami Chile. Anthropocene Coasts, 9(1), Article 40. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44218-026-00154-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44218-026-00154-9

Keywords: Chile, tsunami, earthquake, disaster risk governance, Coquimbo, street-level bureaucracy, place attachment, coastal planning, social resilience, qualitative research, reconstruction, urban planning