Displaced Trust: Disrupting Legal Estrangement during Disaster Recovery.

This article examines how distrust toward state disaster recovery agencies shapes the recovery process in Marion County, South Carolina, a low-income, predominantly Black rural community affected by repeated flooding and hurricanes. It finds that legal estrangement—characterized by procedural injustice, vicarious marginalization, and structural exclusion—hinders residents' access to federal aid, particularly from the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) Individual and Household Program (IHP). Emergent local groups, often led by Black community members, mitigate this distrust by displacing trust from disaster recovery officials onto themselves, helping residents navigate bureaucratic barriers without necessarily improving trust in the state. The study highlights the critical brokering role of these institutional intermediaries in facilitating aid access amid racial, economic, and gendered inequalities embedded in disaster recovery policies and practices.