Post-Disaster Reconstruction and Change: Communities' Perspectives

Successful recovery following a disaster depends upon transcending the disciplinary divides of architecture, engineering, and planning and emphasizing the importance of community perspectives in the post-disaster reconstruction process. Effective results in community recovery mandate that we holistically examine the complex interrelationship between physical and social dimensions.

Through a series of case studies, Post-Disaster Reconstruction and Change: Communities' Perspectives explores community viewpoints on post-disaster aid provided by external agencies and demonstrates how equity and effectiveness are affected by community social organization, power structures, and leadership capacities. The book further focuses on how external aid in turn affects community livelihoods, cultures, and social organizations. Each chapter serves as a real-world case study based on several months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in India, Nicaragua, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Argentina.

Post-disaster community recovery depends on informed decisions that build on lessons learned from past experiences. This book shows how different communities have coped with and responded to various external interventions. Focusing on housing reconstruction and the restoration of livelihood, the authors demonstrate that changes in settlement location, morphology, housing materials, and design produce multiple cascading consequences for the inhabitants of reconstructed settlements. Ultimately, the book establishes the importance of integrating community perspectives in policies and programs for sustainable post-disaster reconstruction―enabling greater resiliency as well as future disaster risk reduction.

Jennifer Duyne Barenstein earned a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the University of Zurich. She has worked and conducted research for over 20 years in Switzerland, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, the Philippines, Argentina, Haiti, and Mexico. Her key areas of interest include the socioeconomic, cultural, gender, and institutional dimensions of post-disaster reconstruction; livelihood restoration; housing; rural infrastructure development; and water resource management. From 1989 to 2008, she was a senior lecturer at the Department of Social Anthropology of the University of Zurich. She is the founder and the current head of the World Habitat Research Center of the University of Applied Sciences of Southern Switzerland. Jennifer has several publications to her credit and was among the principal authors of Safer Homes, Stronger Communities―the World Bank handbook for reconstruction after natural disasters.

Esther Leemann earned her Ph.D. in social anthropology from the University of Zurich. She is a senior lecturer and researcher at the Department of Social Anthropology of the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. She has been involved in several interdisciplinary research projects on post-disaster reconstruction, housing, and natural resource management in Nicaragua and Vietnam and is currently responsible for a research project on land grabbing and displacement in Cambodia.