Introduction – An Overview of the Book: Beyond Conventional Approaches to Disaster Recovery

Summary

Disaster recovery is always a challenging time for affected places. Places, people, environments, and economies try to function and perform again, moving forward across rubbles, dust, pain and death. Disaster recovery is therefore the process by which a system which has experienced a structural failure re-establishes a routine, organized, institutionalized mode of adaptation to its post-impact environment (Bates and Peacock, 1989). This emphasizes the reorganization of social life and the creation of a new, stable relationship between social and environmental features (Bates and Peacock, 1989). Therefore, disaster recovery is a complex process where different actors play a game, interact, conflict and discuss what, how, why to rebuild and recover.

Several common misconceptions, however, exist around the efforts for recovering places. One is that it is often stated that recovery efforts should be oriented towards bringing back the affected places and their social, political, institutional, and organizational features at their ‘normal’ state, to regain an undefined normalcy (Rivera, 2020). But, we can argue, if that state of normalcy prior to the disaster was unable to avoid the occurrence of a disaster, this state of normalcy needs to be changed. Also, who and what define ‘normalcy’? Neoliberal societies such as the contemporary, globalized and hyperconnected ones consist of a complex set of actions, procedures and flows interacting across scales, spaces and places. These can be highly dynamic and quickly change also into so-called remote places. Normalcy, therefore, hardly exists. Places change so do humans, so do environments.

In addition, recovery efforts are often trivialized through slogans such as Build Back Better (BBB), for which disasters should become an opportunity for rebuilding affected places in a way that addresses previous mistakes or weaknesses and makes these places better than before (Cheek and Chmutina, 2022). However, in these inequal and unjust neoliberal societies, whom is this ‘better’ for? For those people or institutions who can exert their powers more than others in channelling funds and making choices? Or for those who need more, who suffered more after the disaster and have fewer opportunities?