Representing Recovery: How the Construction and Contestation of Needs and Priorities Can Shape Long-term Outcomes for Disaster-affected People

Abstract

We contend that the representational aspects of recovery play an important but under-researched role in shaping long-term outcomes for disaster-affected populations. Ideas constructed around events, people and processes, and conveyed through discussion, texts and images, are seldom neutral and can be exclusionary in their effect. This review draws insights from literature across multiple disciplines to examine how the representation of needs, roles and approaches to recovery influences the support different social groups receive, their capacities to recover, and their rights and agency. It shows how these representations can be contested and challenged, often by disaster-affected people themselves, and calls for increased attention on how to move creatively towards more informed, inclusive and supportive recovery visions and processes.

Everyday mobility and changing livelihood trajectories: implications for vulnerability and adaptation in dryland regions

“…For instance, in India, promotion of borewells in our case study area is government policy, a specific technical solution to the (biophysical) problem of water scarcity, which helps to shift the focus away from the larger water footprint of urban areas or the role of the caste system in limiting opportunities for specific sections of the rural population (Singh 2021). In Kenya and Namibia, the focus on humanitarian relief during periods of drought is in sharp contrast to the neglected area of longer-term recovery despite its importance in promoting more a more stable AOS (Few et al 2021b). Additionally, in Ghana, despite years of government programs and subsidies to smallholder farming communities in northern dryland areas to support irrigation and farming during the dry season, the relative economic inequalities of the north-south divide still persist.…”

Provision of Post-flood Housing Reconstruction in Kuala Krai, Kelantan vs. Local Housing Practices

“…UNISDR defines disaster recovery as restoring and improving facilities, living conditions, and livelihood and reducing disaster risk factors (UNISDR, 2009). Along this line, post-disaster recovery should be prioritized by all actors related to PDHR (Few et al, 2021;Finucane et al, 2020). This recovery entails the reconstruction of permanent post-disaster housing for the affected community, which must be responsive to local climate and culture, durable, easily maintained, adaptable for future living, and developed with the beneficiaries' participation (da Silva, 2010).…”