Evaluations of post-disaster recovery: A review of practice material

Abstract

This paper reviews evaluations of post-disaster recovery efforts. The focus is on operational material and other 'grey literature' from disasters that have occurred in Australia, New Zealand and internationally. We develop a typology that categorises disaster events and includes whether evaluations were undertaken; the methods used; and whether the evaluations focused on the processes or outcomes of the recovery program. The review finds a lack of evaluation of post-disaster recovery. Where evaluations have been conducted, they are mostly process-rather than outcomes-based. There is a need for guidance for post-disaster recovery programs to support evaluation practice to determine the effectiveness, efficiency and appropriateness of post-disaster recovery interventions. There is significant investment in post-disaster recovery programs, with little known of their effectiveness. This review identifies useful case studies and methods to evaluate post-disaster recovery efforts, and informs the development of a national post-disaster evaluation framework.

Women’s Empowerment in Post-Conflict Housing Reconstruction in Palestine

“…On the other hand, three practices have very low degree of applicability to women empowerment practice. he results of one sample Wilcoxon signed rank test in Table (2) implied that four out of nine practices of women empowerment have (p-value> 0.05), which are in italic font. This reflected that the respondents didn't consider these practices as statistically significant and hence the hypothesis is rejected "H: the sample median is statistically equal or higher than 3".…”

“…The rankings in Table (2) shows that majority of women respondents stated that they have a good empowerment practice regarding "ensuring rights of land titles for female-headed households in the PDHR", "equal distribution of financial assistance to both men and women", and "equal access to resources and information related to reconstruction" with AI of (86.75%, 70.25%, and 68.00%), respectively. The lowest AI were 14.50% and 4.25% which were sequentially related to "participating the affected women and taking leadership roles in reconstruction process, monitoring and evaluation", and "establishing women's association to support women's collective action to reconstruct their house".…”

“…Disaster is "a serious disruption of society that exceeds its coping capacity" [1: 265]. Disaster, both natural and human induced, cause severe, long term social, economic and environmental impacts around the world every year [2]. It causes massive destruction, damage and human losses, and the victims face the situation of collective suffering and physical and psychological trauma [3,4].…”

The promises and pitfalls of disaster aid platforms: a case study of Lebanon’s 3RF

“…Knowledge about country platform implementation and efficacy remains within the purview of practitioners and is largely undocumented, generating a research gap, impeding knowledge transfer and restricting possibilities for a critical investigation of the establishment and application of governance tools in disaster settings. The research gap is also due to the lack of disaster recovery evaluations that focus on both process and outcome (Ryan et al, 2016). We propose to critically investigate country platforms through the concept of dispositifs, using Foucauldian theory.…”